In her first full-length non-fiction since the influential A Map to the Door of No Return, Dionne Brand explores 17th, 18th and 19th-century English and American literature—and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and world, of what was possible and what was not. "Coloniality constructs outsides and insides—worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated—in order to live something like a real self." In Salvage, internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand offers a bracing account of reading, life and what remains in the wreck of empire. Uniquely and powerfully blending criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist and racist tropes in famous and familiar books, looking particularly at the extraordinary implications and modern-day reverberations of stories such as Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Austen's Mansfield Park; the ways that the practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression. Making and remaking the self in relation to these dominant cultural narratives, Brand learned to read the literature of two empires, the British and the American, in an anti-colonial light—in order to survive, in order to live. The scene is the act of reading; the book, another kind of forensics—a forensics of the literary substance of which the author is made and from which she must recover. Or, if not recover, then piece together as artifact. Much more than autobiography, and much more than a work of literary criticism, Salvage is gripping, witty, revelatory and essential reading by one of our most powerful and brilliant writers.
Author
As a young girl growing up in Trinidad, Dionne Brand submitted poems to the newspapers under the pseudonym Xavier Simone, an homage to Nina Simone, whom she would listen to late at night on the radio. Brand moved to Canada when she was 17 to attend the University of Toronto, where she earned a degree in Philosophy and English, a Masters in the Philosophy of Education and pursued PhD studies in Women’s History but left the program to make time for creative writing. Dionne Brand first came to prominence in Canada as a poet. Her books of poetry include No Language Is Neutral, a finalist for the Governor General’s Award, and Land to Light On, winner of the Governor General’s Award and the Trillium Award and thirsty, finalist for the Griffin Prize and winner of the Pat Lowther Award for poetry. Brand is also the author of the acclaimed novels In Another Place, Not Here, which was shortlisted for the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the Trillium Award, and At the Full and Change of the Moon. Her works of non-fiction include Bread Out of Stone and A Map to the Door of No Return. What We All Long For was published to great critical acclaim in 2005. While writing the novel, Brand would find herself gazing out the window of a restaurant in the very Toronto neighbourhood occupied by her characters. “I’d be looking through the window and I’d think this is like the frame of the book, the frame of reality: ‘There they are: a young Asian woman passing by with a young black woman passing by, with a young Italian man passing by,” she says in an interview with The Toronto Star. A recent Vanity Fair article quotes her as saying “I’ve ‘read’ New York and London and Paris. And I thought this city needs to be written like that, too.” In addition to her literary accomplishments, Brand is Professor of English in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. For more information, please see http://www.answers.com/topic/dionne-b...
