Towards a postcolonial rhetoric: Imperialism in the work of Jessica Hagedorn, Jamaica Kincaid, and Gayatri Spivak

In this project, I trace the term rhetoric in a postcolonial context and recuperate it for critical and political work. By reading the texts of three postcolonial writers, Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters (1990), Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place (1988) and Lucy (1990), and Gayatri Spivak's "Scattered Speculations on the Question of Value," (1985) and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (1999), I examine how each of these texts focuses on rhetoric as a mode of language that embodies imperialism.; Against disciplinary divisions which read and separate Hagedorn, Kincaid, and Spivak's work, categorizing the novel, the personal essay, and critique as distinct forms of knowledge, my reading of their rhetorical work provides an angle of vision that discerns a shared concern with the cultural, political, and economic in imperialism and with rhetoric as a site of political intervention. The effect of these texts must be understood in terms of their constant interrogation of the discrepancies between the rhetorics of imperialism and the violence and hegemony that this rhetoric obscures or attempts to obscure. Tracing the shared dialogue that these texts create, I argue that a reading of their work can provide a rhetorical framework in which to reconceptualize imperialism.; By closely examining the rhetorical work of Hagedorn, Kincaid, and Spivak, I suggest a rhetorical reading practice that links the rhetorical, material, cultural, and political in imperialism. I argue that a rhetorical reading practice can shift perspective on the histories and realities of imperialism as to question fundamental structures and functions about imperialism as a historical and contemporary formation.