چكيده
In this thesis the destructive effects of long years of colonialism and slavery in Jamaica Kinkaid’s novel The Autobiography of My Mother are studied and analyzed thoroughly. The main objective of this research is to examine Kinkaid’s book within the framework of postcolonial studies, in the light of Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi’s psychology of colonialism in their books Black Skin, White Masks and The Colonizer and the Colonized. Fanon describes his purpose as having been to depict the destructive ways in which colonialism affected both the colonizer and the colonized. Fanon’s main concern was to divide the two worlds of the native and the settler. He believes that it is not possible to reach freedom except with political activity and rebellion in order to reconstruct the human conditions and rebuild a ‘new man’ capable to struggle for his liberation. Albert Memmi argues that one of the effects of colonialization on the colonist is the fallacy of their supremacy over the colonized. He states that the colonizer’s aspiration to sustain the dispossessed circumstance of the defeated lies in their racialist awareness and the myth that they are superior. In contrast to Fanon, Kincaid believes, not in the violent political revolution, but in self-love, self-dignity and the struggle to survive the miserable conditions of black African-descendant slaves.
This research finds out that in writing The Autobiography of My Mother, Kincaid’s approach was to resist the negative impact of black slavery and colonialism in various ways. Although she does not support violent actions, no one can certainly assert that she does not desire any political expectations in mind. It might be a long way to reach these objectives, but it is not entirely distan
