The Melancholic Structure of Memory in Dionne Brand's At the Full and Change of the Moon

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the melancholic approach to the losses of slavery and colonialism in Dionne Brand's novel At the Full and Change of the Moon offers a critique of the exclusions and disavowals of modernity. Both in her novel and in her memoir A Map to the Door of No Return Brand represents the black diaspora in the Americas as an allegory about the incorporation of loss and links worldly losses to their psychic remains. She does not thereby pathologize the black diaspora so much as she enables a critical apprehension of the ways modernity's intimate relation to colonialism and slavery may be understood as pathological. As readers of these texts, moreover, we engage in a psychoanalytic and politic hermeneutics that potentially takes us in the direction of protest and political engagement.