El desamparo del lenguaje en Land to Light on de Dionne Brand

Dionne Brand (Trinidad y Tobago, 1953) es una de las poetas más reconocidas del Caribe anglófono y es una clara representate de la situación de la poesía en las Antillas de habla inglesa en los últimos treinta años: la literatura de la región se publica fuera de ella pero no por eso deja de dar cuenta de las realidades caribeñas. En el presente ensayo trabajamos con el poemario Land to Light On (1997) para abordar la visión que se halla en él sobre el lenguaje, sus usos y posibilidades, frente al fracaso de los sueños revolucionarios del pasado y la realidad presente de discriminación y xenofobia. El lenguaje para Brand no puede volverse un refugio, un espacio habitable, un punto de anclaje, sino que resulta siempre un recordatorio del desamparo.

An autonomous place in the global city: an interpretation of Dionne Brand’s “What we all long for”

Dionne Brand creates characters with peculiar aspirations in her novel What we all long for. In Toronto, Quy, Tuyen, Carla, Oku and Jackie have their childhoods and origins shaped by the urban spaces they occupy. The author elaborates the struggles between immigrants in Canada and their children, born in the country, as these young people drift in Toronto. How much are these tensions natural in child-parent relationships? In what ways are they more difficult because of the immigrant experience? In this paper, we focus on Oku to point out that the strain in child-parent relationships resembles the tensions between the diasporic subjects and the global city. We conclude that Oku became more aware of his potential to act upon the development of his identity. The main concept that guided this interpretation was that of reterritorialization, as proposed by Kit Dobson (2006).

Geographies of Risk

This chapter explores how Black diasporic authors use representations of immigration to redefine the relationship queer bodies have to place and to offer radical visions of freedom. It traces how immigration creates conditions of vulnerability, specifically, the loss of privacy and control over one’s body, by looking at feminist ethnographies of Caribbean labor migrants to Canada and at the fiction of Makeda Silvera. From there, the chapter explains how queer writers claim fugitive movement as a way to escape forces that seek to control them and as a way to imagine freedom in the context of marginalization; the chapter does so by analyzing the historiographic and creative work of Dionne Brand. The writers discussed in this chapter reimagine marginalization resulting from immigration as an unexpected pathway of flight and fugitivity.

Translation in Caribbean Literature

This essay weaves together translation and postcolonial literary studies to propose a translational model of reading for Caribbean literature. Translation and creolization provide the conceptual and aesthetic lens for reading Caribbean literary texts: If translation is an apt model, since it captures languages in transit toward other languages and other contexts, creolization embodies the points of contact among what Naoki Sakai calls the “uncountable languages within the literary texts,” unlocking novel ideas of language and literature. The essay offers “translational reading” of texts by Derek Walcott, Velma Pollard, and Dionne Brand as an alternative to the traditionally monolingual model of reading.

‘The slave servant’: Guerrilla Memorialisation and Multi-accented Performances in Naming the Money (2004)

‘Naming the Money’ has become Himid’s signature installation, consisting of 100 colourfully painted figures interacting with each other across a large gallery space accompanied by a soundscape. It speaks to the history of Transatlantic Slavery and to modern modes of labour, which have in common the destruction of identities through the movement across geographies. Scraps of text on accounting paper on the backs of each figure tell poetically the journey of these people through the change in their names when in the new place. The figures act as a guerrilla memorialisation of multiple African diasporic figures who have been forgotten by history. Through the theoretical writings of Paul Ricoeur, Michael Rothberg, Stuart Hall, Dionne Brand, Hershini Bhana Young, Saidiya Hartman and Giorgio Agamben the chapter explicated the ways in which Himid uses her installation to comment on historical and contemporary trauma and those who are lost and displaced, then and now.

Mapping Space, Debating Place: Jelly Mould Pavilions (2010) and Official Sites and Sights of Slavery and Memory

Lubaina Himid’s Jelly Mould Pavilions is an installation which draws attention to Liverpool’s troubled history as the largest eighteenth century slavery port in the world. After a discussion of Himid’s earlier memorial designs for the slave ship Zong as a way of discussing her ideas about memorialisation, the chapter moves to a discussion of the work using theoretical works about history, memory and trauma including the work of Paul Gilroy, Ian Baucom, bell hooks, Jean Fisher, Giorgio Agamben, Dionne Brand, Paul Ricoeur, Susan Stewart and Michael Rothberg. In particular it uses Agamben’s idea of “witnessing in the wake of historical silence” as a mode of understanding Himid’s memorial purpose. It describes the postcolonial melancholia that affects Britain and Liverpool in its reaction to its imperial past and describe Himid’s work as a memorializing attempt to show African peoples and their history as central to local and national narratives of explication, to make them visible. The chapter discusses the mobility of the project existing in multiple venues through the city constructing an alternate promenade through the cityscape making for a counter-public intervention. The Jelly Moulds articulate Liverpool’s entanglement in “spectacular conspicuous consumption” through its trade in slave-produced goods such as sugar and uses architectural models to make the point that there is an alternative future.