SOURCE: “Jamaica Kincaid and the Resistance to Canons,” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, edited by Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido, Africa World Press, 1990, pp. 345–54.

In the following essay, Covi examines intersecting aspects of African-American literature, postmodernity, and autobiography in At the Bottom of the River and Annie John. Covi interprets Kincaid's themes of racial identity, alienation, and history in terms of French literary theory, but maintains that Kincaid's writing defies easy literary classification.

Derrida in Positions¹ speaks of the necessity of ridding oneself of a metaphysical concept of history that is linear and systematic. His claim is for a new logic of repetition and trace, for a monumental, contradictory, multi-levelled history in which the différance that produces many differences is not effaced. Jamaica Kincaid's At the Bottom of the River² and Annie John³ represent examples of writing that break through the...