Eyeing the north star?: Figuring Canada in postslavery fiction and drama

Moynagh, Maureen

doi:10.1177/1477570005050947

Cited by 4 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…To the extent that the passage from Brand's novel quoted above calls to mind Benjamin's famous angel of history, as I have argued elsewhere, 57 it also returns us to the allegorical impetus of Brand's work and of our readerly engagement with it. In his discussion of the conception of allegory Benjamin elaborates in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, George Steiner observes that only allegory "can render bearable an authentic perception of the infernal", and consequently it is "[t]hrough allegory" that "the Angel can look into the deeps".…”

Section: Melancholia As Counter-memorymentioning

confidence: 92%

The Melancholic Structure of Memory in Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon

Moynagh¹

2008

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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In this paper I argue that the melancholic approach to the losses of slavery and colonialism in Dionne Brand's novel At the Full and Change of the Moon offers a critique of the exclusions and disavowals of modernity. Both in her novel and in her memoir A Map to the Door of No ReturnBrand represents the black diaspora in the Americas as an allegory about the incorporation of loss and links worldly losses to their psychic remains. She does not thereby pathologize the black diaspora so much as she enables a critical apprehension of the ways modernity's intimate relation to colonialism and slavery may be understood as pathological. As readers of these texts, moreover, we engage in a psychoanalytic and politic hermeneutics that potentially takes us in the direction of protest and political engagement.Postslavery literature, I will argue in this essay, is the terrain of a melancholic response to the losses of slavery. Insofar as postslavery texts "return to slavery's past … in order to understand its relationship to the present", 2 they comprise a literary corpus that endeavours to accommodate the dead that dominant narratives of modernity have refused to accommodate. In this way this corpus comes to stand in for " [t]hose [bodies]

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Section: Melancholia As Counter-memorymentioning

confidence: 92%