An Oblique Blackness: Reading Racial Formation in the Aesthetics of George Elliott Clarke, Dionne Brand, and Wayde Compton

Abstract

<p>This thesis examines how the poetics of George Elliott Clarke, Dionne Brand and Wayde Compton articulate unique aesthetic voices that are representative of a range of ethnic communities that collectively make-up blackness in Canada. Despite the different backgrounds, geographies, and ethnicities of these authors, blackness in Canada is regularly viewed as a homogeneous community that is most closely tied to the cultural histories of the American South and the Atlantic slave trade. Black Canadians have historically been excluded from the official narratives of the nation, disassociating blackness from Canadian-ness. Epithets such as “African-Canadian” are indicative of the way race distances citizenship and belonging. Each of these authors expresses an aesthetic through their poetics that is representative of the unique combination of social, political, cultural, and ethnic interactions that can be collectively described as racial formation. While each of these authors orients her or his own ethnic community in relation to the nation in different ways, their focus on collapsing the distance between citizenship and belonging can be read as a base for forming community from which collective resistance to the racial violence of exclusion can be grounded.</p>