Dionne Brand

One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024

Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries—tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression.

With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light—in order to survive, and in order to live.

This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.

Salvage Readings from the Wreck

Marion

This book is another kind of forensics. A forensics of how a reader is made. And, unmade. A forensics of the literary substance of which I am made-since it is possible that I am now mostly literary substance-and that I must recover from; and if not recover from, then piece together.

I observe, and live through, the monopoly of interpretation that relegates the art of those who live through catastrophe to spectacle or pathology, and into a symbol of the always not "we." Not art. Not an assemblage of the materials of perception that appraise and know life and what is lived. Not a set of insights and gestures of transformation. So the risk of going forward here is the risk of being read by some in this way. When I use the autobiographical, it is as artifice. It is not an invitation to witness transparency. Where it appears, it will have been pored over, turned over, analyzed, refashioned as art, and made theoretical through those processes. The only place the autobiographical appears in my art with a small vestige of itself may be in the fictions that I write. And even then, alloyed.

So, I am talking about what comes to sit inside narrative writing (prose or poetry) as a result of the genesis, the action and long duration, of certain regimes in our material lives, certain relations of power, that make invisible or ordinary, or a given, those power relations. I am talking about how those very power relations are embedded in the structure and form of storytelling, reproducing the architecture of these regimes.

In her essay "Novel and History, plot and plantation, Sylvia Wynter writes: "We [by which she means plantation or New World societies, are all, without exception, still 'enchanted; imprisoned, deformed and schizophrenic in its [colonialism's bewitched reality." And "the novel form and our societies are twin children of the same parents.

The racial romantic is a set of ideas that seeks to rehabilitate the essentialist categories of race, to prove they are simultaneously true and not true, but nevertheless to keep those ideas fixed; it also seeks to show the extraordinary effort it takes to enter the category of whiteness, and the ultimate sacrifice of doing so. Romantic racism or romantic racialism (a term coined by George Fredrickson) is the ascription of "positive" stereotypes to a group of people in which their difference (from white people) is valorized instead of pathologized. In the case of Behr's Oroonoko, this difference is both valorized and patholo-gized. I will also say that the racial romantic is a site of "illicit" white pleasure, and desire.

The fantasies of oppression and violence range across multiple relations of class, sex and race power. These fantasies are necessary to the maintenance and sustenance of such relations in the sense that they are the verbal or written articulations of those relations; they mythologize and justify the brutalities; they use language, the terrain of meaning, to territorialize meaning, interpretation, existence. They are as necessary as the violence. If conquest, slavery and colonization of lands and people are the main aim, mythologizing and control of the imagination are the equally important conduit to this end. 

A novel is an artifact of its time. We ascribe to it a distance called "art," and we equivocate along the line of that distance.

"European art" (in this instance something called "the novel" seals the form against indictments of its very narration of that time. In this way, it is simultaneously sealing and revealing the affective economies' adjacent position to the political economy.

One might say that the affective is the way that the political economy circulates. That is, the political economy is conjoined with the affective, conjoined with desires; and the relations of ruling inhabit the affective.

that the footprint haunting literature is a spectre of the colonized, a threat both in real and imagined terms; a spectre hanging over the whole enterprise of colonization and slavery.

The books, the sounds, the images; Britain, America, empires — these all arrived as the universal, into which we were supposed to climb. We immediately recognized that we were supposed to become that universal—and also that this was an aspirational category, not a given condition. We would strive to become this universal while recognizing we were not part of it, even as we received lifelong sentences to be advocates for our own entry. We understood the grandiosity of the call and its limits and borders, but we who were "educated" were supposed to become that universal through our own diligent application-or, as it turns out, by a miracle; or no, by self-delusion.

Colonialism is such a pessimistic discourse, especially for the colonized—it is full of hopelessness about one's future, about one's daily appearances. One not only has to confront daily living —the acts of walking, thinking, being on the surface of the planet-one must also confront an imposition of form, of symmetry with the ruling relations. The small restrictive word of the colonial overlays the big world, narrowing philosophical possibilities held in place by power structures undergirded by narrative. But to paraphrase both Audre Lorde (on using the tools of the "master") and Friedrich Engels (on political econ-omy) one cannot be content to take the terms of the literary as they are, and to operate with them, failing to see that by doing so we are therefore confined "within the narrow circle of ideas expressed by those terms.'

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