| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立清華大學 === 外國語文學系 === 100 === This thesis investigates the ways in which the (m)other tongue, the unspeakable mother’s voice which is silenced as the other, is articulated by a Caribbean female subject, in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother, by employing the concepts of hysteria and the uncanny. It examines how the two concepts express political resistance against the non-representative shadow of the Caribbean women, and further considers whether the (m)other tongue can articulate an alternative identity for the protagonist. Chapter one points out that the repetitively intensive mother-daughter complex evident in Kincaid’s work is subverted in this novel. Chapter two traces the concept of the uncanny in connection to the body of the mother, and argues that the uncanny narrative in this novel is crucial to the protagonist’s politics of self-representation. Chapter three focuses on the novel’s emblematical discourse of hysteria as the representation of the abject subject, and examines how the mechanism of hysteria exposes and attempts to debunk the white-male dominant power structure. Chapter four concludes this thesis. Overall, this thesis aims to generate a reconsideration of the novel’s response to the issue of representation of the other Caribbean history.
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