Camille Buxton

October 8, 2009

Building on the Ruins: The Remnants of Colonization and Modernization

            Ruins thematically reoccur in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990) representing a past indigenous culture that is reduced by colonization and modernization. Kincaid uses ruins to symbolically represent the destructive aspects of colonization while suggesting that this disintegration does not indicate that the original culture is entirely forgotten. The presence of these remnants indicates that the original indigenous culture was not erased during the process of colonization but reduced and built upon. The goal of this essay will be to connect conceptual ruins in postcolonial texts to colonization as creation in colonial literature noting that this creation is not entirely original, but one that builds on previous civilization.

            The primary sources for the essay will be Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Kincaid’s Lucy as the texts address colonization from the differing perspectives of the colonizer and the formerly colonized. Because Kincaid view of colonization as destruction is a frequent theme in her work, her A Small Place (1988), “The Ugly Tourist” (1988) and The Autobiography of My Mother (1997) will be referenced as secondary postcolonial texts and used to reveal examples of ruins produced by colonization. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) will be used as a secondary colonial text. Flanders provides a contrasting colonial text to Crusoe to dialogue with Kincaid’s works because it addresses the topic from a woman’s perspective. Secondary references will come from a variety of sources. Edward Said’s Orientalism, Gayatri Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” Aimé Césaire’s Discourse on Colonialism, Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, Bill Ashcroft’s The Empire Writes Back, and Homi K. Bhaba’s The Location of Culture represent some possible secondary sources as each addresses the topics of colonization and its long-term effects on indigenous cultural norms.