Salvage: Readings from the Wreck

Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not.

Coloniality constructs outsides and insides—worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated—in order to live something like a real self.

In Salvage, the internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand offers a bracing account of reading, life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Uniquely and powerfully blending criticism and autobiography as artifact, Brand explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes in famous and familiar books, looking particularly at the extraordinary implications and modern-day reverberations of stories such as Robinson Crusoe and Mansfield Park; 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 consciousness.

Making and remaking the self in relation to these dominant cultural narratives, Brand learned to read the literature of two empires, the British and the American, in an anti-colonial light—in order to survive, in order to live.

The scene is the act of reading. The book, another kind of forensics. A forensics of the literary substance of which the author is made and must recover from, and if not recover, then piece together as artifact. Much more than autobiography or a work of literary criticism, Salvage is gripping, witty, revelatory, and essential reading by one of our most powerful and brilliant writers.