Punk & Pedagogy
Cart
☆ Find Your Stage
A Small Place cover
SEE THROUGH IT

A Small Place

by Jamaica Kincaid

The tourist brochure, answered.

For you if

you have ever been the visitor and wondered who pays for your holiday.

⚡ Choose Your Route ⚡

Not sold directly on this site. Support indie bookstores with a new copy, or go sustainable with a used one.

Buy New on Bookshop.org

Supports independent bookstores

— OR —

Find Used on Better World Books

Secondhand & sustainable

$14 MSRP · Paperback
Reference price shown. Other editions may be available.

Kincaid takes you on the tourist's tour of Antigua, then tells you what the brochure leaves out: the library the earthquake wrecked and the government never rebuilt, the banks, the British, and the visitor's own comfort. It is about eighty pages of controlled fury, and it does what the best nonfiction does, which is make you the subject. Read it before your next vacation, and again after.

Where This Book Lives

Setting
Caribbean
Voice
Written by a Caribbean author
Themes
colonialism's legacyimperialism and exploitationlanguage and powerpolitical corruptionpostcolonial critique
Topics
british empirecolonialism in the caribbean

Short, furious and deliberately uncomfortable. Kincaid was born in Antigua and, per SuperSummary, was unofficially kept out of the country for about five years after publication because the book also indicts Antigua's own government; the book itself was not formally banned, so isBanned stays false. Pairs with Discourse on Colonialism and Harvest of Empire.

Related Viewing

Shares a topic, theme, or setting with this book in the catalog.

Xala poster

Xala(1975)

dir. Ousmane Sembène

Same themes: Political Corruption, Postcolonial Critique

Impotent in more ways than one.

Newly installed in Senegal's post-independence business elite, El Hadji is struck impotent on the night of his third wedding — a curse he comes to suspect is punishment for the corruption and embezzlement that built his fortune. Adapted from Sembène's own novel.

Why it’s here: Punk in turning literal impotence into political indictment — the new Senegalese elite performing revolution while quietly keeping their old French patrons' interests intact. Pedagogical in showing how independence can be captured by the same corruption wearing new clothes.

Where to watch: Streaming on Criterion ChannelLetterboxd ↗

Bacurau poster

Bacurau(2019)

dir. Kleber Mendonça Filho & Juliano Dornelles

Same theme: Political Corruption

A town disappears from the map. Then the hunt begins.

Days after burying its matriarch, a small town in Brazil's rural sertão vanishes from every map, its water supply is cut, and a group of wealthy foreign mercenaries arrives to hunt its residents for sport — only to discover Bacurau has no intention of dying quietly.

Why it’s here: Punk in turning class rage into genre carnage — a marginalized town doesn't wait for institutions to save it, it arms itself and fights back on its own terms. Pedagogical in showing how disappearing a place from official maps is itself a form of violence, before a single shot is fired.

Where to watch: Rent/buy: Apple TV, Amazon, Fandango at HomeLetterboxd ↗