Jamaica Kincaid Essay

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eSharp Issue 16: Politics & Aesthetics The Politics of Ugliness Ela Przybyło (University of Alberta) A Prelude: Jamaica Kincaid’s Ugly Tourist A tourist is an ugly human being. You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day […] An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that. (Kincaid 2000, p.14, 17) Jamaica Kincaid, in her polemic A Small Place, establishes the tourist as a neo-colonizer, and as such „an ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish‟ (p.17). Writing of her home island, Antigua, Kincaid recognizes that ugliness is worn, it does not adhere to the skin, since a tourist is „not an ugly person all the time; […] not an ugly person ordinarily; […] not an ugly person day to day‟ (p.14). Ugliness is worn but it is not worn lightly, it is a political site in that it functions to communicate and mark inequalities. Kincaid elucidates, in the context of a neo-colonial global moment, several insights that lend themselves to my consideration of ugliness. First, for Kincaid, ugliness is not solely an aesthetic designation; it is instead a label that functions politically. Kincaid‟s ugliness is political in the sense that it serves as a marker of a set of binarical hierarchies and inequalities (between the presumably Western, white, and relatively wealthy tourist and the presumably poor, black Antiguan). It is also political in the way it establishes ugliness as a culturally contingent category based on relationality (Kincaid‟s ugly tourist is only ugly qua tourist and in relation to 1 eSharp Issue 16: Politics & Aesthetics Antiguans who do not have the luxury to travel). Second, Kincaid‟s ugliness has a performative
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