Search

"Conversations at the Crossroads" is an interlogue between Indigenous and Black writers and scholars who gathered at Simon Fraser University on the unceded, ancestral territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil Waututh Nations in Vancouver, British Columbia. The purpose of the gathering was to contest and revitalize those critical frameworks that best reflect the complex and longstanding alliances in Black and Indigenous histories, futures, literatures, and experiences. While dialogues across these diverse communities have been going on for a long time, they have not always been foregrounded adequately in public debates and academic discussions. These conversations demonstrate that the language for conceiving and mobilizing comparative studies has changed—to a large extent because Indigenous and Black scholars and writers have pushed to change it and to challenge the power relationships underpinning academic disciplines. Each of the participants reflects deeply on the limits and opportunities of the available theoretical frameworks to reignite conversations between scholarly fields in general, and across postcolonial studies, Indigenous studies, and Black studies in particular.

Analyzing several prose works by author Dionne Brand, this paper explores the degree to which contemporary theories of diaspora and affect, considered jointly, might direct new critical attention upon the frequent depiction of unnerving and impersonally circulating feeling in black art. A theory of ‘diasporic affect’ is cautiously advanced, mindful of the biases and academic fashionability of the terms ‘diaspora’ and especially ‘affect,’ yet hopeful that such a conjugated term may help provide a deeper critical appreciation of Brand’s prose oeuvre as an ethics, art practice, and cultural politics of ‘the unsettled.’ RESUME En analysant certaines œuvres en prose de Dionne Brand, on explore dans quelles mesures les theories contemporaines de diaspora et d’affect, conjointement envisagees, pourraient encourager un nouveau regard critique sur la manifestation frequente d’un sentiment troublant circulant impersonnellement dans l’art noir. Une theorie de l’« affect diasporique » est ainsi soigneusement avancee, tenant compte des prejuges, mais aussi de l’engouement actuel pour les termes « diaspora » et particulierement « affect ». On espere qu’un tel concept conjugue permette une appreciation approfondie des œuvres en prose de Brand comme ethique, pratique artistique et politiques culturelles du « trouble ». KEYWORDS: Dionne Brand; black writing; diaspora; affect

Building upon recent work by Zandria Robinson, which explores how African American publics are often constituted “[i]n and through the idea of the South” (35), as well as work by Jade Ferguson, which demonstrates how white Canadians, at key historical moments, have likewise exhibited strong social and psychological investments in an imagined black South, this essay analyzes fiction by black writers residing in Canada during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that black Canadian writers have represented the black US South for several distinct but overlapping reasons: to assert a broader or “unified” New World black experience; to distinguish the political, cultural, and affective landscapes of Canada; and, finally, to contest the myth of a color blind or “post-racial” Canada. In a robust yet still under-recognized current of black hemispheric thought, Canada stands polysemously “against” the South, exhibiting both opposition to and intimacy with the more prominent discursive space of blackness, while simultaneously illuminating the conflicting and mutually constitutive scripts of national identity and diasporic identification.