In Search of a New Cognitive Schema: Unsettling Colonial Epistemologies in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return

Authors

  • Deborah Pomeranz

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.341

Keywords:

Dionne Brand, epistemology, Postcolonial Studies, Black Diaspora Studies

Abstract

In this paper, I argue that Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging“ unsettles the epistemic foundations of the (Post-)Colonial Anthropocene, which prioritize linearity, binarity, and purported objectivity. Dominant contemporary epistemologies, as Sylvia Wynter has demonstrated, race and gender legitimate knowledge production as the preserve of Man, to the exclusion of human and non-human others. Instead, writing towards the multipolarity and -modality of the Door of No Return, Brand posits and practices, through both form and content, an anti-colonial epistemology, in which temporality and spatiality are recursive and knowledge is embodied and pluriversal.

Author Biography

Deborah Pomeranz

Deborah Pomeranz recently received an MA in American studies from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She has previously studied at Brown University. Her research focuses on race, sexuality, and social movements in the 20th century, as well as questions of methodology and interdisciplinarity in historical research. Her paper comparing perceptions of and responses to violence in 1970s New York, “Angels and Anti-Pornography Feminists: A Comparative Analysis of Civilian Public Safety Organizations,” has been published in aspeers“.

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Published

2021-06-16

How to Cite

Pomeranz, Deborah. “In Search of a New Cognitive Schema: Unsettling Colonial Epistemologies in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, June 2021, pp. 65-82, doi:10.5283/copas.341.