ABSTRACT
In speaking of the legacy of the slave trade in the history of the New World, the damage wrought by tourism in Jamaica Kincaid's native West Indies, or her own travels to the colonial ‘motherland’. Her political critiques aim to overcome masterful discourse without becoming themselves masterful; by the same token, they avoid claiming undue authority while still refusing all subservience. Kincaid's moral formula, with its equivocating ‘perhaps’, might seem a far cry from her earlier militancy, although elsewhere in the text Kincaid fully inhabits her colonial heritage. Kincaid's unlikely apotheosis as travel writer involves some striking political innovations in the genre. Whereas My Garden has extensive developments on the close relationship between botany and empire, in Among Flowers it is Kincaid herself who fills the role of a latter-day disciple of the Linnaean system of scientific plant classification.
