Imaginations and Speculative Writings: Reinvesting Post-Colonial Possibilities and Subjectivities in Kaie Kellough’s Dominoes at the Crossroads

Abstract

Recent studies on speculative literature emphasise the narrative presence of postcolonial thinking that proliferates within the genre. It is the case in the collection Dominoes at the Crossroads (2020) by the African Canadian writer Kaie Kellough, which attempts to re-imagine and tell the story of the black diaspora in Montreal, other than under a colonial spectrum. The short stories use a variety of speculative strategies: whether it is reinvesting a marginalised figure of a classic Quebecois novel or imagining the setting of Montreal’s future in which marginalised populations own a majority of the properties. The analysis of these stories will allow us to show how speculative literature is fertile ground for postcolonial potentialities, by allowing us to project elsewhere. Since speculative literature is a broad genre whose definition is not circumscribed, we will see how reflecting on the alternative postcolonial imaginings through such narrative allows for a rewriting that makes it possible to go beyond the colonial paradigms.