SMELL, TASTE, AND RESISTANCE: SENSORY ECOLOGY AS DECOLONIAL METHOD IN JAMAICA KINCAID'S ANNIE JOHN

Abstract

This article examines Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1985) through the intersecting lenses of postcolonial ecocriticism, decolonial theory, and sensory studies. It argues that Kincaid deploys the senses of smell and taste as a deliberately political epistemological method, constructing Annie’s Caribbean subjectivity against the abstracting, visually dominant rationalism of British colonial pedagogy and culture. Drawing upon Frantz Fanon’s theorization of the colonized body, David Howes’s sensory anthropology, and Sylvia Wynter’s decolonial philosophy of the human, the article contends that Annie’s sensory engagement with Antiguan food, landscape, and bodily experience constitutes a form of eco-resistance: a reclamation of indigenous ecological knowledge from colonial erasure. Food in the novel is not mere sustenance but a living archive of Afro-Caribbean memory, sovereignty, and environmental intimacy. The mother’s kitchen, the tastes of tropical fruit, the smells of medicinal herbs, and the sensory texture of the island’s ecology collectively encode a counter-epistemology that resists colonial curricula and biopower. The article further situates these arguments within the thesis of culinary sovereignty, demonstrating how Kincaid’s narrative transforms the act of eating into an assertion of environmental justice and postcolonial personhood. Ultimately, it proposes that Annie John models a decolonial hermeneutics of the senses in which smell and taste become not only modes of knowing the self but instruments of resisting the colonial world-system.