ABSTRACT
Over the past generation, academic formulations of postcolonialism have been organized, albeit often covertly, around a mythic idea of transformation, a displacement of A into B. My contention here is that these kinds of conceptual equation have become increasingly problematical in an era of what Benedict Anderson calls “long-distance nationalism,” where inhabitants of one country often keep in touch with their former places of domicile through e-mail and the Internet, so that they might in many cases be said to live concurrently in two places at once.1 Rather than the older, modernist idea of exile, which was based upon an epic narrative of the journey involving a diffi cult quest for knowledge and liberation, more recent confi gurations under the rubric of globalization have involved narratives of traversal, a two-way process involving reciprocal interactions between different territories. This has served consequently to problematize the autonomy of the postcolonial subject, both the academic subject and the individual agent which emerge instead as a split and hybrid phenomenon. This chapter will trace how some of these postcolonial paradoxes can be seen to have entangled themselves textually in the work of the Antiguan American writer Jamaica Kincaid.
