DE-SCRIBING THE WATER-BABIES

Abstract

If we accept Craig Tapping’s argument that ‘Practice, the selfrepresentations of formerly silenced, marginalized or negated subjects, is always already a theory of the other’ (1989b:52, my emphasis), what is the theory suggested by the presence of Jamaica Kincaid’s ‘defenseless and pitiful child’ narrator in this extract? Who is the ‘formerly silenced, marginalized or negated subject’ of this story? What does it mean to speak for the child, through the voice of the child, as the child? How does the figure of the child circulate in colonialist texts and post-colonial theory?

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