Salvage
Readings from the Wreck
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Toronto-based poet and essayist Dionne Brand examines English literature’s colonial era—the 17th through 19th centuries—and its modern echoes in this fascinating blend of literary criticism and a reader’s autobiography. The book asserts that through their depiction of characters ranging from the Indigenous Friday in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to the runaway Jim in Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, many literary works of this era continue to teach even Black readers of today like Brand how to see themselves. From her musings on beloved literary touchstones like Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters to her consideration of nearly forgotten works like Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel Oroonoko, which was once considered an early argument against slavery (to a modern reader, it clearly is not), Brand is fascinating, thoughtful, and outspoken. And what’s great is that the purely autobiographical aspects of this lyrical, witty, and occasionally scathing work are just as compelling.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this scintillating literary analysis, Canadian poet Brand (Nomenclature), who grew up in Trinidad, examines depictions of imperialism in works by Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, and other British writers. English imperialist fiction assumes a white audience and inculcates a perspective that takes white supremacy as given, Brand contends, discussing how she identified with white protagonist Amelia Sedley while reading Thackeray's Vanity Fair as a preteen, only to experience "shock" upon rereading the book as an adult that she had no memory of the Black and Indian characters on the novel's periphery. She argues that the normalization of slavery was often achieved by relegating it to the background, recounting how as a child she had been entranced by Mr. Rochester's opulent lifestyle in Brontë's Jane Eyre and only later realized it stemmed from his involvement in the slave trade. Elsewhere, Brand critiques how racial "difference is both valorized and pathologized" in Aphra Behn's 1688 novel Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave, and how Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe treats its white protagonist's enslavement as unjust while regarding the enslavement of nonwhite people as acceptable. Brand's piercing analysis is at once sweeping and deeply personal, shedding light on how English literature whitewashed imperial conquests one reader at a time. It's a potent reevaluation of the British literary canon.
