Salvage Readings from the wreck

In this scintillating literary analysis, Canadian poet Brand (Nomenclature), who grew up in Trinidad, examines depictions of imperialism in works by Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, and other British writers. English imperialist fiction assumes a white audience and inculcates a perspective that takes white supremacy as given, Brand contends, discussing how she identified with white protagonist Amelia Sedley while reading Thackeray's Vanity Fair as a preteen, only to experience "shock" upon rereading the book as an adult that she had no memory of the Black and Indian characters on the novel's periphery. She argues that the normalization of slavery was often achieved by relegating it to the background, recounting how as a child she had been entranced by Mr. Rochester's opulent lifestyle in Brontë's Jane Eyre and only later realized it stemmed from his involvement in the slave trade. Elsewhere, Brand critiques how racial "difference is both valorized and pathologized" in Aphra Behn's 1688 novel Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave, and how Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe treats its white protagonist's enslavement as unjust while regarding the enslavement of nonwhite people as acceptable. Brand's piercing analysis is at once sweeping and deeply personal, shedding light on how English literature whitewashed imperial conquests one reader at a time. It's a potent reevaluation of the British literary canon. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (Oct.)

Black lives in literature. Award-winning novelist Brand, Toronto's former poet laureate, melds autobiography and literary criticism to offer a shrewd, intimate reading of the 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century novels that shaped her sense of self. She terms this fictional trove a "wreck," from which she aims to salvage "the literary substance of which I am made." As a Black girl attending an Anglican school in Trinidad, she was schooled in "the racial work of literature, whose most abiding feature will be our absence, on the one hand, and our eternal subjugate presence, on the other hand." From novels such as Thackeray'sVanity Fair, Defoe'sAdventures of Robinson Crusoe, Austen'sMansfield Park, Aphra Behn'sOroonoko, and Charlotte Brontë'sJane Eyre, which she reread later at the University of Toronto, she came to understand the power of narrative structure and style--sentences, character, dialogue--to teach her "how to feel and what to feel" about her identity as a Black woman in a "world of coloniality." "I am not interested in the morality of any given writer," she asserts; "I am interested in the construction of, and the information contained in and relayed by, their paragraphs. I want to see what the writing imports from the systems in which the writer (and the work) is immersed." That system was imperialism, dependent on the slave trade, on the suppression of non-whites, and on a firm belief in the unbridgeable chasm between civilized and savage--a depiction, Brand finds, that persists even in contemporary novels. J.M. Coetzee'sFoe, for example, insists on reviving the question, "Can Black people be trusted with freedom?" Paintings, movies, photographs (especially a significant portrait from her childhood), and American novels and popular culture are all part of the wreckage that Brand astutely analyzes. Penetrating cultural criticism. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.