The expansion of self-representation in Jamaica Kincaid's autobiographical discourse

This study examines some works by the Afro-CaribbeanAmerican writer Jamaica Kincaid -At The Bottom of the River, Annie John, Lucy, The Autobiography of My Mother -as threshold examples of the autobiographical genre, in which representation of the "I" is expanded to include the "us". Considering the limits between autobiography and fiction and how self-representation deviates from the conventions of autobiography in autobiographical novels, it analyzes the extremely traumatic and painful mother-daughter relationship throughout the texts, as an analogy to the colonizer-colonized relations. The construction of a new identity free of authoritarian influences symbolizes the ultimate reward in the set of selected works, read as a bildungsroman of mythical proportions.