Bodies of Knowledge: Embodiment and Colonial Epistemology in Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother

This paper reads Jamaica Kincaid’s Autobiography of My Mother as an analysis of the body in its connection to colonial history and counter-history. It situates René Descartes’ theory of mind-body dualism in relation to colonial conceptions of the human. The Cartesian definition of the human as a being of mind and the animal as a being of body is echoed in colonialist ethnography, which attributes rational will to the European while casting African and West Indian subjects as bodies ungoverned by reason. Kincaid’s novel engages the historical reduction of West Indian subjects to bodies marked by irrationality. By placing the body at the centre of revisionist histories, the novel deploys embodiment to dismantle colonial ideology and denaturalise the distinction between rational and irrational subjects, thereby challenging universalising and ahistorical accounts of embodied experience.