Giving Toronto a Black Eye: Neo-Flânerie and Dionne Brand’s thirsty

Abstract

This essay argues that Dionne Brand employs a peripatetic approach to mapping the city of Toronto in the long poem thirsty that shares—and extends—some key qualities of flânerie. I propose that Brand’s revision of the traditional trope of city strolling, which I am calling new- or neo-flânerie, produces a way of translating the culturally, racially, ethnically and linguistically diverse city that renders its multiplicity an integral and central—rather than a marginal and vexing—aspect of the contemporary metropolis. Brand’s neo-flânerie captures and interrogates spaces and places in the city at the level of the street and through a lens that refuses to reject or render invisible those spaces, places and people that are often marginalized or erased by the gaze of the traditional white, male, bourgeois flâneur.