Tiana Reid is a Postdoctoral Associate in the Department of English at Brown University. Her writing has been published in American Quarterly, Art in America, Bookforum, Frieze, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, among other places. She is a former editor at The New Inquiry and Pinko, and currently sits on the editorial collective of Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory. She will join York University in July 2022 as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English.
Title: “‘One is not in control in dreams’: On Noting and Noticing.”
Abstract: The subtitle of Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return is “Notes to Belonging.” The subtitle serves as an announcement of form but also as an address, a direction, or movement. In this paper, I sketch the shape of Brand’s collection of “fragments,” signaled by subtitles and numbers, notes that are “disparate and sometimes only related by sound or intuition, vision or aesthetic” (19). How does the overall arrangement of A Map to the Door of No Return reflect belonging’s expression as a certain “drift” (118)? How do we read Brand’s notes to belonging, charged with a deep sense of heterogeneity and ambivalence, glimpsed through self-observation and self-consciousness?