The Fiction of Memory and the Language of Forgetting

Article論文departmental bulletin pape

Brother

One sweltering summer in the Park, a housing complex outside of Toronto, Michael and Francis are coming of age and learning to stomach the careless prejudices and low expectations that confront them as young men of black and brown ancestry. While their Trinidadian single mother works double, sometimes triple shifts so her boys might fulfill the elusive promise of their adopted home, Francis helps the days pass by inventing games and challenges, bringing Michael to his crew's barbershop hangout, and leading escapes into the cool air of the Rouge Valley, a scar of green wilderness where they are free to imagine better lives for themselves. Propelled by the beats and styles of hip hop, Francis dreams of a future in music. Michael's dreams are of Aisha, the smartest girl in their high school whose own eyes are firmly set on a life elsewhere. But the bright hopes of all three are violently, irrevocably thwarted by a tragic shooting, and the police crackdown and suffocating suspicion that follow. Honest and insightful in its portrayal of kinship, community, and lives cut short, David Chariandy's Brother is an emotional tour de force that marks the arrival of a stunning new literary voice

“Black States”: Diasporic Affect in the Prose of Dionne Brand

Analyzing several prose works by author Dionne Brand, this paper explores the degree to which contemporary theories of diaspora and affect, considered jointly, might direct new critical attention upon the frequent depiction of unnerving and impersonally circulating feeling in black art. A theory of ‘diasporic affect’ is cautiously advanced, mindful of the biases and academic fashionability of the terms ‘diaspora’ and especially ‘affect,’ yet hopeful that such a conjugated term may help provide a deeper critical appreciation of Brand’s prose oeuvre as an ethics, art practice, and cultural politics of ‘the unsettled.’ </jats:p

Conversations at the Crossroads: Indigenous and Black Writers Talk

N/