Born in Trinidad and Tobago, Louis M. Maraj thinks, creates, and converses with theoretical black studies, rhetoric, digital media, and critical pedagogies. His projects specifically address anti/racism, anti/blackness, and expressive form. Maraj’s Black or Right: Anti/Racist Campus Rhetorics received the 2022 CCCC Outstanding Book Award and NCA’s Critical and Cultural Studies Division 2022 Outstanding Book Award. His essays appear in several journals and edited collections, including most recently in Women’s Studies in Communication, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and A Socially Just Classroom. He is an assistant professor in University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism, Writing & Media.
Article: “Quite here you reach”: T(h)inking Language, Place, Extraction with Dionne Brand’s Land to Light on
Abstract
Performatively exhibiting its argument for “t(h)inking”—para- the usual verb “think,” a process that meditates on, critiques, and undoes extractive Euro-Western logics by which stitched meaning becomes undone, unfurled to fray—this study communes with Dionne Brand’s Land to Light on. It t(h)inks with apposite “tinker,” fiddling to no particular end, with specific regard to themes of language, place, and extraction in Dionne Brand’s collection of poems. Intertwined with deeply personal vignettes on its author’s first return to Trinidad after moving to so-called Canada, this unconventional prose/poem/essay avers that we might understand what has been noted as “ambiguity” by literary scholars in readings of Land as instead representative of para/ontological notions of Blackness: movings across, along, outside, adjacent to ontological nothingness and paraontological fugitivity for Black meaning-making energy in the Western world.
Canadian Literature special issue #251 on poetics and extraction is available to order through our online store at https://canlit.ca/support/purchase/single-issues.