Scrappy Reading; Or, Reading the Breakdown in a Small Place

Abstract

Eschewing a standard scholarly approach, this article moves intimately – personally – with and through Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place in order to consider the radical potential of the breakdown to transform postcolonial environmental relations. Drawing on Disability Studies and Discard Studies to nuance conceptions of breakdown critical to the Postcolonial Environmental Humanities, this text works to claim the breakdown as a commons and to pursue the work of commoning by taking up and taking on breakdown. First, by attending to the ways in which a scrappy approach can animate a textual encounter where and when the text comes apart, and then by pursuing that undoing into the breakdown, this text makes its way to a small place, where waste and wasted life come together, and the constraints imposed by shrinkage (Dokumacı) give rise to new ways of coming together.