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We can agree, I think, that invisible things are not necessarily "notthere"; that a void may be empty, but is not a vacuum. In addition, certain absences are so stressed, so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves; arrest us with intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them. (Morrison 11)
Jamaica Kincaid's Lucy has inspired various criticism ranging in focus from postcolonial discourse isolating elements of resistance in the novel, to psychoanalytical readings centering around the novel's mother figure. The question of aesthetic representation seems to be so central to Kincaid's novel because of its numerous references to artists, paintings, photography, and writing. Several literary critics have focused on Lucy as an artist figure in the novel; Lima reads Lucy as an artist-in-formation who creates a homeland for herself within her art (863), while Mahlis' argument centers around the importance of aesthetics in helping Lucy forge a "gendered self ' ( 1 8 1 ). Some critics have emphasized how Lucy deforms traditional narrative forms from the Bildungsroman1 to the genre of travel literature.2 But it seems that there is no satisfactory critical account of the means by which artistic expression itself is engendered in the novel and functions to articulate an alternate means of uncovering history.
Lisa Lowe discusses aesthetics in terms of the fissures or gaps existing amid universalized representations and the material conditions of suppressed and marginalized histories that are made invisible by such idealizations. Lowe maintains that "the question of aesthetic representation is also always a debate about political representation," and that this is true because there exists a "conflict between the national desire for resolution through representational forms and the unassimilable conflicts and particularities that cannot be represented by those forms" (4). The very narratives that attempt to relate a story of immigrant inclusion "from foreign strangeness to assimilation and citizenship" contain within them elements that will undermine that very narrative because such stories are "driven by the repetition and return of episodes" in which the marginalized subject "continues to be located outside the cultural and racial boundaries of the nation."3 This results in cultural formations and expressions that are "materially and aesthetically at odds with the resolution of the citizen...