ABSTRACT
Jamaica Kincaid was born in Antigua, West Indies, in 1949, and emigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen; her novel Annie John is set in Antigua and traces the individuation of an autobiographical protagonist. Rachel Blau DuPlessis explores the way Western women writers subvert the marriage plot of the novel through themes of reparenting, female bonding, mother-child dyads, and brother-sister pairs. She studies a number of modern texts in which women 'find themselves' in ways other than through romance. Novels by women of color, particularly women from outside the United States, draw on different traditions and reflect a different set of cultural assumptions from those that writers like Annis Pratt and DuPlessis define as universal. The storytelling tradition among people connects the present with the past, establishes a sense of community, and testifies to the power of language not only to record but to transform reality.
