OVERLAPPING TERRITORIES, DRIFTING BODIES in Dionne Brand’s Work
OVERLAPPING TERRITORIES, DRIFTING BODIES in Dionne Brand’s Work

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the issue of national and gendered identity as related to the transcultural topographies of Canada in Dionne Brand’s work. Given her multiple dislocations between the Caribbean and Canada, and given her liminal location as a woman and a black lesbian, Dionne Brand openly critiques identity politics, offering counter-narratives which figure new spaces to inhabit. As the geographical boundaries of nations do not reflect her imagined community, Brand’s works reveal the unfolding of fluid textual maps which re-chart and re-configure transnational diasporic communities between the Caribbean and Canada, making these very spaces flowing, shifting, where territories overlap and desiring bodies wander adrift. She imagines an embodied cartography of desire between the Caribbean and Canada traced out through the representation of erotic, sensual, and affective bodies.

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