Unfolding and De-linking Agency in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return

Authors

  • Kerry-Jane Wallart Université d'Orléans

Abstract

This article looks at the strategies deployed by Dionne Brand in order to map out subaltern agency against a background of post-plantation loss, rootlessness and disempowerment. It follows the modes in which an impossible writing of the past is diverted into practices of shaping a new imaginary space for all “the other dwellers of the door” to which Map to the Door of no Return is dedicated. Referentiality is re-cast as an address to future selves rather than a reference to any past identities and stories. I contend here that Brand’s poetical agenda makes for a decolonial de-linking of literary discourse from the imperatives of Western realistic “representation” in order to re-centre enunciation on the poetic persona. This enunciation is not individualized but mediated through the emergence of forms of collective re-memory.

Author Biography

Kerry-Jane Wallart, Université d'Orléans

Kerry-Jane Wallart is a Full Professor in Black Atlantic studies at the University of Orléans. Her Alma Mater is the École Normale Supérieure Ulm and she has been a Procter Fellow at Princeton University. She has published over thirty book chapters and articles, co-edited an issue of Sillages Critiques (2019), an issue of Revue de Littérature Comparée (2017), a volume on Jamaica Kincaid, published by Wagadu in 2018, and edited three issues of Commonwealth Essays and Studies (2019, 2012 and 2009). 

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Published

2020-01-31

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 2 (2019): Référence et référentialité 2

Section

ARTICLES

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