Beautiful the beauty—Dionne Brand’s Theory and Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis
Abstract
Against the reductive and the often universalizing poetics of much poetry and much theoretical discourse that abandons feelings from its rhetoric, the works of Dionne Brand’s Theory and Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis promote layered, black and multivocal reflections on beauty. They act out self-interrogating dialectics rather than provide symbolic clarity of their subjects. There is no aesthetic consolation in these works and that’s where the beauty lies. Their works ask readers to enter into irreducible complexity as a form of attention. I posit that these black creative politics – in this poetry – are tied up in reading-work that can newly anticipate our global condition through ethical collectivity.
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Butler, Octavia. “Furor Scribendi.” Blood Child and Other Stories. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995. pp. 138-142. Print.
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Hartman, Saidiya. “The Burdened Individuality of Freedom.” Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction. Minneapolis, Racked and Dispatched, 2017. pp. 31-47. Web.
Ka, Ndjha. “On beauty and terror: The Black Outdoors.” FOTW. Matri-Archi(tecture), 2018. Web.
Lorde, Audre. “Grammar of Dissent: Poetry and Prose.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Fredericton: Crossing Press, 2007. Print.
Lubrin, Canisia. “The Writer in the World: On Beauty and Poetry.” Open Book, 2017. Web.
Lubrin, Canisia. Voodoo Hypothesis. Hamilton: Wolsak & Wynn A Buckrider Book, 2017. Print.
McKittrick, Katherine and Walcott, Rinaldo. “Difficult Pleasures.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Volume 34. University of Toronto Press. Winter 2015. pp 6-11. Web.
Moten, Fred. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” South Atlantic Quarterly, 112:4. 2013. pp. 737-80. Web.
Moten, Fred. “The Clase of Blackness.” Criticism. Volume 50, No 2. Wayne State University Press, 2008. pp. 177-218. Web.
Moten, Fred. The Little Edges. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print.
Moure, Erin. Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erin Moure. Ed. Shannon Maguire. Middletown: Welsleyan UP, 2017. Print.
Nolan, Martin E. ““Do the Damn Thing:” Letters After Trump: An Interview with Canisia Lubrin.” The Puritan: Issue 36, Winter 2017. Web.
Sanders, Leslie. “What the Poet Does For Us.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Volume 34. University of Toronto Press. Winter 2015. pp 15-28. Web.
Simon, Roger I. Teaching Against the Grain: Texts for a Pedagogy of Possibility.” New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1992. Web.
Sinclair, Sue. “As the World Ends, Has the Time for Grieving Arrived?” Brick Magazine via Literary Hub. 2017. Web.
Willis, Elizabeth. “Work This Thing.” Boston Review. Boston: JSTOR, 2015. pp. 3-7. Web.
Wynter, Sylvia. “1942: A New World View.” Race, Discourse and the Origins of the Americas. Edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. pp. 5-57. Web.
Bakhtin, M. M. and Pavel Medvedev. The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics. tr. Albert J. Wehrle. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1991. p. 131. Web.
Baldwin, James. Giovanni’s Room. New York: Penguin Random House, 2004. Print.
Belcourt, Billy-Ray. This Wound is a World. Calgary: Frontenac House Poetry, 2017. Print.
Brand, Dionne. Theory. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf Canada, 2018. Print.
Butler, Octavia. “Furor Scribendi.” Blood Child and Other Stories. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1995. pp. 138-142. Print.
da Silva, Denise Ferreira. “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World.” The Black Scholar. Issue 44, 2014. pp. 81-97. Web.
Felman, Shoshana. “Education and Crisis.” Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 1992. Web.
Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013. Web.
Hartman, Saidiya. “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors.” Souls. 18:1, 2016. pp. 166-73. Web.
Hartman, Saidiya. “The Burdened Individuality of Freedom.” Afro-Pessimism: An Introduction. Minneapolis, Racked and Dispatched, 2017. pp. 31-47. Web.
Ka, Ndjha. “On beauty and terror: The Black Outdoors.” FOTW. Matri-Archi(tecture), 2018. Web.
Lorde, Audre. “Grammar of Dissent: Poetry and Prose.” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Fredericton: Crossing Press, 2007. Print.
Lubrin, Canisia. “The Writer in the World: On Beauty and Poetry.” Open Book, 2017. Web.
Lubrin, Canisia. Voodoo Hypothesis. Hamilton: Wolsak & Wynn A Buckrider Book, 2017. Print.
McKittrick, Katherine and Walcott, Rinaldo. “Difficult Pleasures.” TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Volume 34. University of Toronto Press. Winter 2015. pp 6-11. Web.
Moten, Fred. “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh).” South Atlantic Quarterly, 112:4. 2013. pp. 737-80. Web.
Moten, Fred. “The Clase of Blackness.” Criticism. Volume 50, No 2. Wayne State University Press, 2008. pp. 177-218. Web.
Moten, Fred. The Little Edges. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2014. Print.
Moure, Erin. Planetary Noise: Selected Poetry of Erin Moure. Ed. Shannon Maguire. Middletown: Welsleyan UP, 2017. Print.
Nolan, Martin E. ““Do the Damn Thing:” Letters After Trump: An Interview with Canisia Lubrin.” The Puritan: Issue 36, Winter 2017. Web.
Sanders, Leslie. “What the Poet Does For Us.” Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies. Volume 34. University of Toronto Press. Winter 2015. pp 15-28. Web.
Simon, Roger I. Teaching Against the Grain: Texts for a Pedagogy of Possibility.” New York: Bergin and Garvey, 1992. Web.
Sinclair, Sue. “As the World Ends, Has the Time for Grieving Arrived?” Brick Magazine via Literary Hub. 2017. Web.
Willis, Elizabeth. “Work This Thing.” Boston Review. Boston: JSTOR, 2015. pp. 3-7. Web.
Wynter, Sylvia. “1942: A New World View.” Race, Discourse and the Origins of the Americas. Edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995. pp. 5-57. Web.
Perry Cox, A. (2021). Beautiful the beauty—Dionne Brand’s Theory and Canisia Lubrin’s Voodoo Hypothesis. Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, 11, 115–131. https://doi.org/10.14201/candb.v11i115-131
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