Living "Ordinary Dreariness" of Postcoloniality: Transnational Ontology in Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy

In her 1990 novel Lucy, Jamaica Kincaid revises Enlightenment epistemology with a transnational ontology. She puts the Cartesian subject, existing a priori outside the world as pure being, in context as being-in-the-world inhabiting the arena of history. In doing so, she appropriates postmodern aesthetics to critique the ideological continuance of modernist agendas which obscure neocolonial realities by "posting" the modern / colonial. Situating the narrative in the lived experiences of Lucy, a nineteen-year-old woman from Antigua working as an au pair in New York, Kincaid calls attention to the oppressive colonial and nationalist regimes without falling into the pitfalls of postmodern (non)space of floating signifiers. In contextualizing the Western subject in relation to those living their "ordinary dreariness" "over there," she proposes a transnational subject, aware of common humanity inhabiting the shared world and history.