Abstract: This article addresses the challenge of articulating an immediate transnational
response to migration as presented in the West Indian travel narrative of Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy
(1990). In particular, Lucy highlights the conflict between the migrant’s urgency to project a
spontaneous translation of a transnational encounter and the presence of presumptive global
knowledge that controls all cultural readings of transnationalism. I argue that Lucy interrogates
the grand West Indian and North American narratives of migration and deliberately exposes their
illusive authority. Thus, Lucy presents the protagonist’s orchestration of textual, visual, and
aesthetic betrayal that effectively exposes the effaced limitation and deficiency in both western
and global interpretations of the transnational encounter. My argument follows an
interdisciplinary approach as it engages translation studies and post-structuralist, narratological,
and cultural critiques of global western textuality. In particular, Homi Bhabha’s, Gayatri
Spivak’s, and Gerard Genette’s theories are integrated and redirected in my discussion of agency
via disloyalty in Lucy.