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Both the 1996 novel In Another Place, Not Here by Trinidadian Canadian writer Dionne Brand and the 2017 poetry collection Voodoo Hypothesis by St. Lucian Canadian poet Canisia Lubrin are concerned with desires spanning the Caribbean archipelago, to Canada and back again. The narrators and protagonists of Brand’s text migrate across this archipelago while navigating various desires—for places, people, a sense of belonging, and revolution—that serve as a way of bridging distances between bodies, continents, and moments in time. Lubrin shares in that project by not only writing about the archipelago’s historic echoes and present connections, but by explicitly dedicating one of her poems to Brand. In this article, we read desire and the archipelagic in these works not just together, but through one another, conceptualizing what we call an “archipelago of desire.” The notion of the archipelago proves useful due to the concrete geographical constellation that forms the Caribbean and that can, in extension, be used to explore not merely one or two forms of mobility, but a plurality of im/mobilities, such as these speakers’ crisscrossing paths. In using the archipelago to grasp desire, we see different desires as fragmented and interwoven; they are part of not a whole but of something which resists being a whole, much like an archipelago resists being subsumed into one category; desire is then a way of assembling these things together while affirming their fragmentary nature.

A meditation on an image in Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return, in which a young Dionne Brand discovers a book, The Black Napoleon, in the bottom drawer of her grandmother's wardrobe, and begins to read it. "The Bottom Drawer, or, The Beginning of Reading" is also a meditation on the act of reading as related to tactility, initiation, and transformation; on ancestors and where descendants imagine their ancestors gathering; the pose of the subject in a photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo; the influence of The Black Napoleon in Dionne Brand's writing/life; and the genesis, in reading, of the writer Dionne Brand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reflection considers the ways Dionne Brand's conceptualizations of the Black body in Map to the Door of No Return reveal its liberatory potentialities. By grouping athleticism with other forms of artistry, Brand's consideration of the sporting body suggests its possibilities in creative and intellectual projects. I use the conceptual tools provided in Map to consider American gymnast Simone Biles' actions in the 2020 Olympics as one of these sites, moments, and movements of possibility. Reading her experiences historically and metaphorically through the Door of No Return, I suggest that Biles' refusal to compete to preserve her mental health was a powerful act of resistance and "way-finding" (Map 44). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taking seriously Brand's conception that we "have no such immediate sense of belonging, only of drift" (Brand 2001, 118), this commentary meditates on Brand's conception of "drift" as both a theory and method of Black temporality. Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2001) draws us towards the uncharted/able expanse of the Door of No Return, and particularly the ways the Door overwhelms temporal senses and experiences. The Door, Brand describes, is a passport from a territory so vast that "[w]e are always in the middle of the journey" (Brand 2001, 49). Map invites us not only to consider the inadequacies of origins and nation-state boundaries. Map also theorizes the inability of normative temporal schemas to render sensible the "past's" ongoing presence in Black life in the wake(s) of the Door and the Middle Passage of racial slavery. Mirroring Brand's weaving of personal narrative and theory, this reflection turns to the relationship between forgetting and time, particularly in intergenerational conversations, to understand how the Door disorients normative logics of time as a dimension of Black psychic life that people share in. In doing so, this reflection sits with how Map names a temporality of the Door that is not about fantastical change or transformation, but about continuous arrivals to the experience of a suspension that one never quite leaves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reflection on Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return, originally presented at A Map to the Door of No Return at 20: A Gathering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A reflection on Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return for the A Map to the Door of No Return at 20 on November 3-6, 2021. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On page 89 of A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand writes, "The door is not a map. The door is on my retina." Jon Jon Moore reflects on how this line, from this book preyed on his senses - permanently marking his skin, contextualizing his own myopia, and mending the gap of retinal detachment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay brings together the writing of Audre Lorde and Dionne Brand and their responses to their visits, decades apart to the dungeons of Elmina. The essay proposes that Elmina Castle and the other forts used for the purposes of trading enslaved Africans can be understood as particle accelerators because of their reduction of key components of communities into individuals for sale. The word "particular" in the writing and speaking of Lorde and Brand offer us a poetics beyond individuality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the narratives recounted in Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return, is a story of Rastafari longing for return. This discussion considers that story, told to Brand by a friend, alongside Chronixx's song "Capture Land" and Nabil Elderkin's short film, "Captureland." In reading these works together, I use the concept of "capture land" to engage with the question of the authority of maps. I also examine how these works narrate land, coloniality and the politics of longing and belonging in diaspora and how they each locate Black life in and through different sites and scenes of (dis)orientation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Returning to Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return (2001) in light of its scholarly reception and Brand's subsequent works, this article focuses on narration as a form of post-colonial redress with particular attention to Brand's use of second-person narration as a device of counter-estrangement. Taking a cue from Brian Richardson's description of the second person as an "unnatural" register of narration, it explores Brand's use of the second person as a voice of commingled alterity that has strong ethical implications for readers. With Brand's analysis of "what sits in narrative" in An Autobiography of an Autobiography of Reading (2020) as a hermeneutic, the article demonstrates how, by blurring the gap between narratee and reader, Brand puts the reader "in the room with history". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recomposing bright shimmers of autobiographical memory, this essay ruminates on the author's reencounter with Dionne Brand's resplendent cartographic poetic, A Map to the Door of No Return, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary, 20 years into the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, arguing that the text theorizes the gulf between Blackness and the World as rooted in the question of affective experience. I read Brand's deployment of the concept-metaphor of "the Door" and its attendant "tear in the world" as indexing the chasm from which Black feeling outside of and against "the World" as relational container irrupts. Brand's text reveals that rather than offering an escape from meaning-as-capture, when considered from the position of Blackness, feeling is capture, and it is this seemingly paradoxical state of things that renders Black affect aporetic. Feeling-as-capture is antithetical to dominant theorizations which posit that the ontology of affect is escape. By theorizing capture as endemic to Blackness and therefore at the root of Black sensorial experience, Brand locates a rift in the very structure of affect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dionne Brand's meditative and narrative rule-breaking book, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, reveals the ways in which the incredible effortfulness of living, dreaming and sleeping is not only proof of a shared condition of Blackness but also of an antiblack world. Sleep (or a lack thereof) indexes scales of and relations to antiblackness. In this paper, I consider the mirrored boundaries between wakefulness/sleep and life/death, probing their psycho-existential and ontological infrastructures. I argue that these states of being are tethered, however tenuously, to each other and in doing so, clarify the stakes of the ostensibly quotidian and mundane. By analyzing insomnia, slumber, fever dreams and nightmares, the text reveals the literal and metaphorical coordinates that locate the bounds of Black consciousness and freedom. Black sleep becomes a kind of freedom, insofar as it offers reprieve that is only possible when the dreamwork is forgotten or psychically registered as nothing at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing attention to the subtitle of Dionne Brand's 2001 nonfction book A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, this article traces the author's comparison between diaspora and "bad dreams," as arranged in fragments and shaped by transhistorical logics of captivity. I stage a collision between notes and dreams, two of A Map to the Door of No Return's many literary contours, in order to accentuate the author's powerful critique of the romantic and violent assumptions of belonging. Brand's deposition, where dreams constitute evidence, is not so much an undoing of historical violence--an impossibility--as it is a psychic undoing, hesitantly redirected back to the text's unstable "I." Approaching the enforced collectivity of Canadian nationalism, I close by locating A Map to the Door of No Return in a local context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article, which originally appeared in “TransCanadiana: Polish Journal of Canadian Studies”, offers a posthuman reading of Dionne Brand’s short story Blossom. It starts with a general discussion on posthumanism, providing some critical insights about posthuman thought. It then offers a reading of Dionne Brand’s short story Blossom through a problematization of the (liberal humanist) notion of the ‘human’. In particular, it focuses on the specific language used in the story, the spatial categories employed by Brand, and the act of giving up one’s self‑possession to more‑than‑human powers as Blossom’s way to self‑empowerment. By becoming a priestess of the goddess Oya (or, indeed, the goddess herself), Blossom is able to escape the modern Western socio-political discourses of authenticized and stabilized identities based on race, gender, religion, cultural background, and Western‑inflected ‘humanity’.

In a wide‐ranging and pithy article, Guest‐Editor of this issue and Professor at the Graduate School of the University of California, Berkeley, Jill Stoner evokes humanity, rivers, dogs and language to present a case for an architecture of refusal that allows us the possibility of 'breathing together'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The books A Map to the Door of No Return. Notes to Belonging (2001) by Trinidadian-Canadian writer Dionne Brand and Lose your Mother. A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2006) by U.S. American Saidiya Hartmann address the subject of the journey to Africa, in particular to the symbolic space of the "Door of No Return". We argue that these books contribute to the renewal of the travel writing genre by assembling geographical displacement as ways of reshaping genealogical memories of slavery. In these texts, we find female Afrodiasporic subjects transiting contemporary migration movements and the slave trade routes, accompanied in these experiences by the interrogation of silenced family and collective memories. In this itinerary, the books question and subvert the archives on imperial journeys, while generating new cartographies and reconstructing genealogies organized largely around the experiences of racialized women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Caribbean writers use the full array of relationships the word "aunt" signifies to formulate new ways of representing subjectivity. The Aunt's ubiquity in Caribbean literature offers critics fresh theoretical perspectives from which to account for the choices Caribbean writers make. The essay introduces the term "Amital Queer" to characterize how Dionne Brand uses aunts in her "Dialectics" poems and Hilton Als embraces the role of auntie man in The Women, to enable a critique of heteronormativity. I argue that the figure of the aunt stands in for the artists when they claim their space as speaking subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Los libros A Map to the Door of no Return. Notes to Belonging (2001) de la escritora trinitaria-canadiense Dionne Brand y Lose your Mother. A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2006) de la estadounidense Saidiya Hartmann abordan el tema del viaje a África, en particular al espacio simbólico de la “Puerta de no Retorno”. Proponemos que estos textos contribuyen a la renovación del género de la escritura de viajes, ensamblando el desplazamiento geográfico con el esfuerzo por reconfigurar memorias genealógicas de la esclavitud. En estos textos encontramos sujetos afrodiaspóricos femeninos que transitan por las migraciones contemporáneas y las rutas de la trata esclavista, en desplazamientos acompañados por la interrogación de memorias familiares y colectivas que han sido silenciadas. En este itinerario, los libros cuestionan y subvierten los archivos sobre los viajes imperiales, a la vez que generan nuevas cartografías y reconstruyen genealogías organizadas en gran medida en torno a las experiencias de mujeres racializadas.

This paper explores the relationship established in Primitive Offensive by Dionne Brand between landscape and language and how that link is medialized by the body. With the definition of “topographic writing” as a starting point –a productive category to think how Anglophone Caribbean poetry builds its relationship with landscape– fragments of Primitive Offensive in which there is a clear interlink between body and landscape through fragmentation as an aesthetic approach will be analyzed. The selection of poems covers the first narrative arc in the book, which extends from Canto I to IV, in which there is an obsessive search for the origin, search that would be revealed as an illusion in Brand’s work.

This paper considers the philosophical concept of cosmopolitanism within the global context of increasing securitisation and the racial surveillance of asylum seekers and migrants. It explores how a literary text, such as Dionne Brand's long-form poem Inventory (2006), offers a way to assess critically the hidden architectures of migrant detention centres and illuminate what has been called the 'banopticon' apparatus and its disciplinary management of the immigrant other (Bigo, D., 2008. Globalized (in)Security: the Field and the Ban-opticon [sic]. In: D. Bigo and A. Tsoukala, eds. Terror, Insecurity, and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes After 9/11. London: Routledge, 10–48). In contrast to literary writers who seek to humanise the plight of individuals caught up in the so-called migrant crisis, Brand instead represents flows of data that tally the overwhelming effects of the nation-state's entanglement with globalisation, as well as the material realities of the state's response. Drawing on developments in surveillance studies including Steve Mann's notion of 'sousveillance' – a form of counter-surveillance initiated from below – this paper analyses Inventory and proposes that it generates a cynical cosmopolitan vision, a cosmopolitanism of detachment that bears witness to the structural forms of state oppression and disenfranchisement. The paper concludes by aligning Brand's negative cosmopolitanism with the politics of refusal, as first articulated in cosmopolitanism's origins by Diogenes the Cynic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the concepts of "not here" in Dionne Brand's work and "not yet here" in José Esteban Muñoz's work. These concepts are linked with queer desires, but also postcolonial longings and visions for other political and social possibilities. Both Brand's and Muñoz's writings rephrase and rearticulate various Third World social revolutions as part of their examination of queer possibilities, practices and narratives. Their work reinscribes and re-imagines histories and practices of marronage which have been central to Caribbean anticolonial thought, politics and narrative. A reading of Brand's novel In Another Place, Not Here directly considers and examines its investments in marronage for constructing queer possibilities and futures. "Not here" references the historical and imaginative practices of Maroon flight that enables a rethinking of colonial histories and their interrelated structuring epistemologies of race, gender, sexuality and territoriality, and which enacts a move towards (re-)imagining queer possibilities and futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article focuses on two short stories, Edwidge Danticat’s ‘Epilogue: Women Like Us’, the final story in Krik? Krak! (1996. New York: Vintage Books), and Dionne Brand’s ‘Blossom, Priestess of Oya, Goddess of Winds, Storms and Waterfalls’, from Sans Souci and Other Stories ([1988] 1989. Ithaca NY: Firebrand Books). In these stories, Danticat and Brand narrate the lives of Caribbean women who have journeyed abroad in search of a better future, and the protagonists also continue to develop their respective identities through the challenges of leaving their homes. Danticat follows the life of a young girl, while for Brand it is a middle-aged woman who feels old beyond her years: the authors narrate versions of (historical) events from the perspective of these women, additionally (re)writing Caribbean history in feminist terms. Furthermore, treating the actual bodies of the narrators as living texts for the embodied experiences and oral stories of their ancestors, the protagonists become palimpsests in their current lives/life stories. This, in turn, affects their futures. While at times their matrilineal, ancestral voices may be a burden, they also provide a source of empowerment for the two protagonists, enabling them to pursue their chosen careers despite the barriers they face. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activist artists Dionne Brand and Alanis Obomsawin have much in common in their poetics of resistance. Brand's writings and documentaries explore issues of displacement, race, gender, and colonialism, revealing a constant determination in giving voice to what was silenced or marginalized by the dominant culture. Similarly, Obomsawin's documentaries show a long commitment to the history of aboriginal people, reclaiming their sovereignty of voice. Making use of polyphony, these two artists contest hegemonic discourses and a nationalist aesthetic that either ignores or appropriates difference. This study discusses the implications of polyphony in Brand's poetry and two documentaries, Sisters in the Struggle and Long Time Comin', and in Obomsawin's documentaries, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance and Rocks at Whiskey Trench. All evidences demonstrate fine specimens of applied poetics, faithful to their ethics of resistance.

This essay explores the interface between the re-writing of history and the re-writing of the history of sexuality in the poetry and fiction by the Caribbean-Canadian writer Dionne Brand. Starting from her poetry book No Language Is Neutral (1990), as the first work in which she openly deals with lesbian love and sexuality, and closing with her novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), this paper traces the narrative of non-heterosexual love and desire in Dionne Brand’s work, reading the representation of the racialized and sexed body in Brand’s writing in the light of Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of the body.

Activist artists Dionne Brand and Alanis Obomsawin have much in common in their poetics of resistance. Brand's writings and documentaries explore issues of displacement, race, gender, and colonialism, revealing a constant determination in giving voice to what was silenced or marginalized by the dominant culture. Similarly, Obomsawin's documentaries show a long commitment to the history of aboriginal people, reclaiming their sovereignty of voice. Making use of polyphony, these two artists contest hegemonic discourses and a nationalist aesthetic that either ignores or appropriates difference. This study discusses the implications of polyphony in Brand's poetry and two documentaries, Sisters in the Struggle and Long Time Comin', and in Obomsawin's documentaries, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance and Rocks at Whiskey Trench. All evidences demonstrate fine specimens of applied poetics, faithful to their ethics of resistance.

Dionne Brand's 2002 book of poetry, thirsty, is a site of intersection between two lines of inquiry that currently animate scholarly conversations in trauma studies; questions about the representation of traumatic experience collide with questions about the genealogy of trauma as a discourse, or with what it means to become authorized as a victim of profound rupture or violence. Here, Brand registers a deeply unsettled anxiety about the process by which a black subject becomes legible in discourses of diasporic and racialized trauma and suffering, where an individual's pain becomes the object of empathic consumption and absolution. What Shuh-mei Shih calls 'Trauma-ism' is thus an acutely de-politicizing and sentimentalizing gesture, so that Brand seems to mourn not the failure to metamorphose trauma into narrative, but the difficulty in making that act perform any real cultural or political work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading across epistemic borders in a globalizing world requires a revised understanding of how experimentation functions in decolonizing contexts by intervening to trouble the prevailing paradigms through which readers understand how meanings are made. Experimental fictions free the imagination to envision cognitive and social justice, which take different forms within different settings. By examining several texts written out of contexts of incomplete decolonization and ongoing imperialism in Canada, Australia, and the Caribbean, this paper shows how their various innovations navigate the problems of scale and generate new forms for representing cognitive justice in its many different potential manifestations, thus revealing the vitality of nonscalable worlds and the links between the scalable and the nonscalable. Wilson Harris' music of living landscapes is set in dialogue with Alexis Wright's fictions; Patrick White's artist as vivisector with Christian Bök's The Xenotext; Dionne Brand's quest for a cognitive schema beyond captivity with Wright's and Tomson Highway's turns to the space/time imaginaries of their people; and Shani Mootoo's small island world with Jamaica Kincaid's small place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses Dionne Brands In Another Place, Not Here and Erna Brodber's Myal to discuss the approaches I used in teaching black diasporic literature in two Kenyan universities. It argues that the best approaches are those that encourage students to use higher-order learning processes spontaneously and create an appropriate teaching environment suited to the region's historical, geographical, and cultural context vis-a-vis black diasporic cultural, historical, geographical, and literary backgrounds for students with some grounding in African literature. The selected methods take into account challenges concerning students' access to learning resources, students' individual strengths and interests, medium or large class sizes, and the need to provide adequate background information for literatures that originate from different geographic, linguistic, and cultural contexts than those of the class members. In Another Place, Not Here and Myal illustrate the main concerns and issues that arise when teaching black diasporic literatures in Kenyan universities. Although the texts are mostly taught within an implied comparatist, multi-disciplinary, and translational mode, they also provide context for postcolonial inquiry into the wider black cultural and historical encounter with European imperialism and the resultant power dynamics that continue today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Formal experimentation is a recurring feature in the literary output of works dedicated to the African diaspora, both in prose and in verse, and is easily understood as the artistic response to the need to recount a story that is abnormal – a story, that is, that could not be told using conventional literary models. But virtuosity is more than a merely formal device in these works: it affects both how and what it delivers, and can thus be read in light of the testimonial function the work of art performs towards the millions of people who died in the years of the slave trade, and as a celebration of the public role of art. Using trauma theory as a framework to approach two works of poetry,Zong!by Tobago-born Marlene NourbeSe Philip, and “Ruttier for the Marooned in the Diaspora” by the Trinidadian writer Dionne Brand – writers who belong to the Afro-Caribbean diaspora – this article addresses the importance of both formal inventiveness in rendering the traumatic experience and the relevance of testimony in order to explore the ethics of reading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on recent developments in material feminist theory (Alaimo and Hekman 2008; Barad 2008; Tuana 2008), this article examines the representation of the female body as a site of trans-corporeal toxicity in Dionne Brand's latest poetry collection Ossuaries (2010). Yasmine, the central figure in the text, embodies a trans-corporeal toxicity inscribed by the violence of multiple histories and discourses across different temporal and spatial frameworks. Significantly, as Brand's collection illustrates, trans-corporeality is not only a site of violence and death, but also a place of desire and resistance. "Thinking through toxic bodies," Alaimo claims, "allows us to reimagine human corporeality, and materiality itself, not as a utopian or romantic substance existing prior to social inscription, but as something that always bears the trace of history, social position, region, and the uneven distribution of risk" ("Trans-Corporeal" 261). Brand's Ossuaries brings the paradoxical nature of trans-corporeality into the forefront by providing a material feminist account of the intimate, and sometimes lethal, outcomes of the crossing of material borders, particularly for the female body. By dealing with the permeability of boundaries between the human body, technology, and the natural world as a site of interconnectedness, agency, and dependency, Ossuaries provides a feminist critique of the material, ethical, and political impact of hegemonic structures and practices of power in an unevenly globalized 21st century.

In her 1984 poetry collection, Chronicles of the Hostile Sun, Trinidadian-Canadian author Dionne Brand examines the radicalism of the Grenada Revolution (1979–1983) vis-a-vis mainstream North American politics, which were decidedly antirevolutionary during the late 20th-century Cold War. Brand uses poetry to imagine what it means to claim sovereignty in the postindependence Caribbean. This article argues that Brand’s poetry unsettles “facts” about the revolution’s history by discrediting American imperialist rhetoric and policy in the Caribbean. Drawing on Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s concept of the North Atlantic universal as a fiction or colonial construct, I examine Brand’s efforts to undo US narratives that portray the Grenada Revolution as undemocratic and oppressive. Brand writes the Grenada Revolution in a way that reveals it as a collective project of Caribbean people whose goals and values have points of similarity as well as points of difference from those in the Global North. My analysis explores the way in which Brand sets up literary texts, and poetry in particular, as an alternative form of historical narrative in response to US-centered North Atlantic universals. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]