"Maybe home is an uneasy place": Dionne Brand's uneasy home-spaces

When contemporary Caribbean-Canadian writer Dionne Brand encounters home, she is confronted by social norms - domestic and national - that may exclude her based on race, gender, sexuality and birthplace, or that may include her on the conditional denial of any one of these identifications. Reading her memoir and three novels, this study examines Brand's conceptualization of home and her attempts to uncover its failings, dismantle its borders, and ultimately refigure the concept of home as what I term Brand's uneasy homespaces - sites where provisional reterritorializations sign and enable agency, open the possibility of connection through negotiation, and retain uneasiness as a reminder of necessary provisionality. Through prolonged attention to the difference between the theoretically empowering and the materially destructive, Brand resists utopian fantasies of cosmopolitan global citizenship and the metaphorization of homelessness, while also countering, in her later work, easy dismissals of the nation-state by presenting a community that gains agency through identification with the city and nation even as it actively critiques the state.

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Ottawa (Canada)

Year dc:date

2013

Author dc:creator

• Wilson, Danielle

• Literature, Modern.
• Canadian Studies.
• Caribbean Studies.

Language dc:language

en

Identifier

Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 48-06, page: 3369.
http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-12515

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/28364