After devoting much of this podcast to the pressing topic of Dads Who Are A**holes (and have failsons), here’s our second back-to-back episode on Moms Who Are A**holes (this time with a success daughter). We love Jamaica Kincaid, and we especially love her 1990 novella Lucy about a young West Indian woman who comes to work as an au pair for clueless bourgie white people in the United States. We’re talking race and colonialism, capital, gender and sexuality, and, yes, mothers. We also plunge into the pressing question: why do rich white sh*theads love claiming to be “Indian” so much?
We read the Ferrar, Straus and Giroux edition. There are two pieces of scholarship we talk about on the show which we highly recommend. For how Lucy explores outsider-ness as a way of disrupting white, bourgeois structures, check out Jennifer J. Nichols’s “‘Poor Visitor’: Mobility as/of Voice in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy” in MELUS. And for more on Lucy’s sexual adventures as strategies of resistance and becoming, see Gary E. Holcomb’s “Travels of a Transnational Slut: Sexual Migration in Kincaid’s Lucy” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction.
Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at betterreadpodcast@gmail.com. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.