Port Rupture(s) and Cross-Racial Kinships in Dionne Brand and Lee Maracle

Abstract

This paper examines Lee Maracle’s Talking to the Diaspora and Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return for their respective responses to the Komagata Maru in 1914 and to the Chinese migrants denied entry in 1999. These literary moments are points of departure to examine the Indigenous, Black and Asian kinships that arise within and beyond the colonial policing of encounters. Indeed, Maracle and Brand reconceptualize migrant entry as entry into geographies of kinship rather than into the divisive geography of the port under the nation-state regime. The very site of Asian exclusion that constitutes a Canadian identity, the port, becomes a geographic modality through which racialized collectivities emerge from the possibilities of borderless entryways.