Two Cheers for the Resistant Subject: Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy

This paper is an exploration of Jamaica Kincaid’s novella Lucy (1990) to ascertain the protagonist’s character as a resistant subject. Lucy registers the postcolonial-feminine rewriting project by standing against the dominant culture and by rewriting her identity. She asserts and informs the Centre of her difference and thus challenges the hegemonic discourse. She has a crucial subject position and offers an interesting point of reference with regard to her ambivalent relationships with the native land and with the so-called superior culture to which she is exposed. Therefore, the paper intends to locate Lucy’s resistance in terms of her displacement, as her character is torn between two cultures of home and not-home which resultantly cultivate extreme ambivalence in her. The argument leads to an unavoidable merger of the two terms ambivalence and displacement, which finally corresponds to Lucy’s resistant relationship with her mother/mother-land and with the colonizer.