An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading

The geopolitics of empire had already prepared me for thiscoloniality constructs outsides and insides--worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated--in order to live something like a real self.

Internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand reflects on her early reading of colonial literature and how it makes Black being inanimate. She explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes; the ways that practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own expression and its own consciousness.

Dionne Brand is a Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist. She has won many awards, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Trillium Prize for Literature, the Pat Lowther Award for Poetry, the Toronto Book Award, the OCM Bocas fiction prize, and the Blue Metropolis Violet Literary Prize. Brand is professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph.