Dionne Brand and Corporeal Commemorations

This article grapples with the question of how to commemorate transatlantic slavery within a diasporic context. It looks critically at various acts of monumentalism and their historical use in the writing of national narratives. Proposing the need for alternate sites of remembrance, the paper offers a reading of Dionne Brand's novel At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999), in order to examine the roles fiction might play in commemorating slavery. Using a theoretical framework informed by Edouard Glissant, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Hortense Spillers and Katherine McKitrrick, the paper examines acts of corporeal commemoration enacted by various female characters within Brand's novel, to interrogate the ways monumentalism is often both a nationalist and a masculinist project.