Book details

Publication date: January 2020
Features: Foreword/liminaire
Series: CLC Kreisel Lecture Series
Keywords: literature, narrative, race, literary criticism, reading practices, colonial aesthetics, C. L. R. James, William Makepeace Thackery, John Keene, Gwendolyn Brooks, slavery and narrative, race and narrative, Jean Rhys
Subject(s): LITERARY CRITICISM / Women Authors, Creative Writing, Creative Writing / Literary Nonfiction, Creative Writing, Creative Writing / Essays, Black Studies, Creative Writing, Creative Writing / Auto/biography & Memoir, LITERARY CRITICISM / Canadian, Literary Criticism / Black Poetics, literature, narrative, race, literary criticism, reading practices, colonial aesthetics, C. L. R. James, William Makepeace Thackery, John Keene, Gwendolyn Brooks, slavery and narrative, race and narrative, Jean Rhys, Canadian Literature, Literature: history & criticism, Black Authors and Authors of Colour
Publisher(s): The University of Alberta Press, Canadian Literature Centre / Centre de littérature canadienne

Dionne Brand. 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 Book Award, 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.

“An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading is exemplary and eye-opening. It reckons with coloniality and the narrative demands it makes in our lives and in our stories, examining canonical texts through close-reading strategies and reflexive thinking that are unparalleled in their clarity and rigour.” [Full article at https://humberliteraryreview.com/reviews-1/2020/06/10]

Shazia Hafiz Ramji, The Humber Literary Review


"How ... do we begin to detoxify our reading practice in a way that lets the reader into the frame, away from the aegis of racism, xenophobia, and violence that layer our 'timeless' classics?"

Shivanee Ramlochan, Caribbean Beat, May/June 2021


"Brand brings a poet's emotional lucidity to her recollections of growing up a voracious reader, and of the creeping realization that the literature she consumed as a Black woman was not written for her."

Miranda Martini, Alberta Views Magazine, October 2021


"Born in 1953, nine years before Trinidad & Tobago gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1962, she is uniquely poised to critique empire, the literary canon being an imperial project.... In this lecture...Brand mapped its limits and questioned its capacity to contain us, when these books are so often hailed to effortlessly do just that."

Akilah White, The Book Slut, 05/12/2020


“Like all of Brand’s writings—her fiction, poetry, and essays—this book offers another compelling perspective on the possibilities of Black aesthetics and continues her crucial interventions that seek to overturn the epistemic violences engendered by colonial literature, reading, and archival practices.... Brand reflects on her early experiences of reading the colonial canon of writers like Thackeray and how encounters with colonialist tropes in effect render her—and other similar postcolonial othered subjects—invisible.”

Nicole N. Aljoe, Modern Philology


AUPresses Book, Jacket, & Journal Show - Poetry and Literature, United States
Winner
2020
Trade Non-Fiction Book of the Year | Alberta Book Awards, Book Publishers Association of Alberta, Canada
Winner
2021
ISBNs: 9781772125085 978-1-77212-508-5 Title: an autobiography of the autobiography of reading ISBNs: 9781772125139 978-1-77212-513-9 Title: an autobiography of the autobiography of reading ISBNs: 9781772125146 978-1-77212-514-6 Title: an autobiography of the autobiography of reading ISBNs: 9781772125153 978-1-77212-515-3 Title: an autobiography of the autobiography of reading