Exposing the violence of empire in the novels it left behind

Written by
Sophie Gee, Associate Professor of English
Oct. 8, 2024

In her new book Trinidadian-born writer Dionne Brand rereads classic English novels, teasing out evidence of the ravages of colonialism.

Dionne Brand is a poet, novelist and essayist who was born in Trinidad and moved to Canada in 1970. She seeks, across all her work, to interrupt history. Or, as she puts it in her new book, Salvage: Readings From the Wreck (Macmillan, Oct. 1, 2024), describing how the fiction writer John Keene blows “life into the collapsed world of coloniality,” she exposes histories that have not previously come to the surface, finding traces that were of little importance to the white writers of England’s colonial past.

In Salvage, which Brand calls “an autobiography of the autobiography of reading,” she returns to some of the 18th- and 19th-century social-realist novels — Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, Robinson Crusoe, and Mansfield Park — that she read as a young person, along with more recent spinoffs such as Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea and J.M. Coetzee’s Foe. Having been trained to read the classics as an Anglophile Commonwealth subject, first in the West Indies and then in Canada, Brand rereads them to recover the Black and Indigenous lives that English realism obscured.

It’s not that Black and Indigenous bodies are simply pushed aside in these novels; they’re kept in sight just long enough for their presence to underscore and intensify their absence. In short, Brand shows that learning to read English literature involved learning not to notice who, or what, was missing.

Read the full review: