Jamaica Kincaid's works consistently explore how colonial history affects contemporary everyday
lives. Throughout her novels short fiction and non-fictional essays Kincaid's texts engage
with history through its medial representations which are starkly determined by colonial
perspectives. This study examines the entanglements of temporalities in current perceptions of
the past and how literary text intervenes in historical consciousness. With a focus on the
media text image and the human body the chapters of this book demonstrate how Kincaid's
poetics of impermanence counter colonial representations of history with strategies of
ambiguity repetition and redirection. Kincaid's texts repeat and revise aspects of colonial
history - a process that decenters the totality of historical colonial ideology and replaces it
with self-determined versions of the past through a multiplication of perspectives and voices.
