Port Rupture(s) and Cross-Racial Kinships in Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle

• Tavleen Purewal ^[1]
  1. [1] University of Toronto

     University of Toronto

     Canadá

     
• Localización: Canada and Beyond: a Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural, ISSN-e 2254-1179, Vol. 8, n. 1, 2019, págs. 51-60
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • This paper examines Lee Maracle’s Talking to the Diaspora and Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return for their respective responses to the Komagata Maru in 1914 and to the Chinese migrants denied entry into BC in 1999. These literary moments are points of departure to examine the Indigenous, Black, and Asian kinships that arise within and beyond the colonial policing of encounters. Dionne Brand’s theorizations of the Door of No Return—a synedoche of the slave trade ports in Africa—make it possible to consider the port as a site of violence whose ruptures can potentially produce unexpected solidarities between racialized subjects and intimacies amongst their various, incommensurable histories and experiences. Indeed, Maracle and Brand reconceptualize migrant entry as an eruption into geographies of kinship rather than into the divisive geography of the port under the nation-state regime. While focusing on Asian migration in Vancouver, the texts also depict Indigenous and Black stranger intimacies, which constitute a web of racialized relations that marks the inextricability of decolonization and Black liberation from transnational affiliations, migrant justice, and Asian kinships.