Salvage: Readings from the Wreck

One of Literary Hub's most anticipated books of 2024. Winner of the 2025 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature. Finalist for the 2025 Zora Awards. Dionne Brand explores English and American literature, and the colonial aesthetic that shaped her sense of self and the world, of what was possible and what was not. In Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, Dionne Brand’s first major book of nonfiction since her classic A Map to the Door of No Return, the acclaimed poet and novelist offers a bracing look at the intersections of reading and life, and what remains in the wreck of empire. Blending literary criticism and autobiography-as-artifact, Brand reads Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, and Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, among other still widely studied works, to explore encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries―tropes that continue in new forms today. Brand vividly shows how contemporary practices of reading and writing are shaped by the narrative structures of these and related works, and explores how, in the face of this, one writes a narrative of Black life that attends to its own consciousness and expression. With the power and eloquence of a great poet coupled with the rigor of a deep and subtle thinker, Brand reveals how she learned to read the literature of two empires, British and American, in an anticolonial light―in order to survive, and in order to live. This is the library, the wreck, and the potential for salvage she offers us now, in a brilliant, groundbreaking, and essential work.
ASIN: 0374614849
VSKU: DBV.0374614849.G
Condition: Good
Author/Artist:Brand, Dionne
Binding: Hardcover
Note: Any images shown are stock photographs and product may differ from what is shown.
Condition Notes: Gently used with minimal wear on the corners and cover. A few pages may contain light highlighting or writing, but the text remains fully legible. Dust jacket may be missing, and supplemental materials like CDs or codes may not be included. May be ex-library with library markings. Ships promptly!