In History Jamaica Kincaid Summary

Jamaica Kincaid, born Elaine Cynthia Potter, has clearly never been content with accepting the world as presented to her. She changed her name, as she felt it wasn’t representative of her origins or the history of her bloodline. Moreover, her name wasn’t the only name she had a problem with; in her passage,”In History,” she undertakes the enormous task of demolishing and reestablishing our understanding of the names we encounter on a daily basis. Through intentionally withholding information and repetition, she takes apart our traditionally accepted, racially constructed worldview piece by piece, replacing it with the rarely explored truths of what naming does to a people and to a place.
Kincaid's repetition of ¨What is history?¨ plants the seeds of doubt within the reader's mind of what he has been taught throughout his life about names and how the world around him came to be. She strategically omits a large majority of history,¨My history began like this: in 1492, Christopher Columbus discovered the new world,¨ to showcase the erasure that occurs when naming. She furthers this concept by later stating,¨ [...] he empties the land of these people, and then he empties the people, he just empties the people. It is when this land is
By intentionally withholding information, as shown in,¨Carl Linnaeus was born on the 23rd of May, in 1707 somewhere in Sweden. (I know where, but I like the high handedness of not saying so.)¨ Kincaid shows the reader how easy it is for information to be lost, mistranslated, or intentionally excluded in history. She chooses here to not clarify where Linnaeus was born, leaving us, the readers, clueless as to where. She determines the knowledge that we possess on Linnaeus. Writings throughout history shape the future´s perspective on history and on the present, and those who write the history have the ability to shape the world in any form they