Unthinking Mastery

150 chApter fIve

we begin to learn the ecological stakes of human mastery and the critical

potentialities of feeling, recognizing, and inhabiting our own discomforts.

Throughout the text, she evokes the garden as a place rooted in mem-

ory and history and underscores the personal and political pasts—and the

forms of violence that constitute them—that grow into and through the

garden. It is a space in which the seeds of mastery continue, in more and

less subtle ways, to germinate through the gardener and her particular at-

tachments. The discomforting turn of Kincaid’s text also circles us back

to the very beginning of Unthinking Mastery, to the grounding claim that

while the rhetoric and activism of decolonialism have decried mastery in

its expressly colonial form, they have failed to account for the ways that

mastery has continued to propagate in other, but critically related, forms

5.1 Jamaica Kincaid watering her Vermont garden. Jamaica Kincaid by Annie
Leibovitz (1999).