SOURCE: “Lucy and the Mark of the Colonizer,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 39, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 237–59.

In the following essay, Ferguson examines problematic issues of cultural, sexual, and racial identity in Lucy, focusing on the protagonist's struggle to free herself from the established order and prejudices of Eurocentric colonialism.

As I go on writing, I feel less and less interested in the approval of the First World, and I never had the approval of the world I came from, so now I don't know where I am. I've exiled myself yet again.

—Donna Perry, “An Interview with Jamaica Kincaid.”

“But I couldn't speak, so I couldn't tell her that my mother was my mother and that society and history and culture and other women in general were something else altogether.”

—Lucy

[The third scenario] is the scene where this new thing [cultural positionality] is worked out, and the...