Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Kincaid, Jamaica - Hilton Als (review date 18 February 1991)

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Hilton Als (review date 18 February 1991)

SOURCE: “Don't Worry, Be Happy,” in The Nation, February 18, 1991, pp. 207–09.

[In the following review of Lucy, Als discusses Kincaid's bitter depiction of Caribbean colonialism and racism in Lucy and A Small Place, noting their effect on shattering the popular myth of tropical paradise.]

With the publication of her short-story collection At the Bottom of the River in 1984, Jamaica Kincaid became our premier monologuist about the Caribbean. Focusing on her native Antigua, she wrested from it a variety of tales whose locus was dispossession: the emigrant who abandons the familiar in favor of self-invention in the new.

The means Kincaid has employed to examine this theme—fiction and the essay—have prompted two critical reactions. For works like River and the first-person coming-of-age novel Annie John (1985), she has been lauded as a...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. David Nicholson (review date 3 July 1988)
   2. Louis James (essay date Winter 1988-89)
   3. Susanna Moore (review date 7 October 1990)
   4. Giovanna Covi (essay date 1990)
   5. Opal Palmer Adisa (review date February 1991)
   6. Hilton Als (review date 18 February 1991)
   7. Evelyn J. Hawthorne (review date Winter 1992)
   8. Moira Ferguson (essay date 1993)
   9. Diane Simmons (essay date Summer 1994)
   10. Keith E. Byerman (essay date February 1995)
   11. Jamaica Kincaid with Ivan Kreilkamp (interview date 1 January 1996)
   12. Richard Eder (review date 14 January 1996)
   13. Merle Rubin (review date 17 January 1996)
   14. Lore Segal (review date 5 February 1996)
   15. Johanna Keller (review date Summer 1996)
   16. Louis F. Canton (essay date Fall 1996)
   17. Edyta Oczkowicz (essay date Fall 1996)
   18. Nancy Chick (essay date September 1996)
   19. Andrea Stuart (review date 11 October 1996)
   20. Jacqueline Brice-Finch (review date Winter 1997)
   21. Gay Wachman (review date 3 November 1997)
   22. Kristen Mahlis (essay date Spring 1998)
   23. Deborah Plant (review date Fall 1999)
   24. Maxine Kumin (review date March 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Jamaica Kincaid