English 9199B

Writing Diaspora in Theory and Practice: Dionne Brand’s Prose

Instructor: Professor D. Palmateer Pennee
Winter Half Course.

This course will study selected prose works by Dionne Brand for their theory and practice of diaspora and diaspora’s intersection with a range of other key terms in contemporary cultural studies, such as geography, nation, hemisphere, place; form, reading, embodiment, affect; autobiography, historiography, memory, phenomenology; race, gender, sexuality, class.

While attending to the specificities of Brand’s engagements with selected terms, we will also consider methods called for by those engagements, some demonstrated in her own work, some evident in scholarship, others yet to be invented, perhaps by participants in this course.

Students, then, will be expected to read Brand’s work alongside a range of journal articles about Brand’s work and about key terms. Scholarly monographs (or parts thereof) for required reading will be Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents and Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake.

Course outline/syllabus: English 9199B