Dionne Brand's Global Intimacies: Practising Affective Citizenship

Rosi Braidotti suggests that ‘The human has been subsumed in global relations of intimacy, complicity and proximity with forces of the inhuman and post-human kind: scientific, industrial and military complexes, global communication networks, processes of commodification and exchange on a global scale.’ She argues further that it is the task of critical theory to track the ‘fluctuations’ of this new disorder (264). In this paper, I ask what tracking these fluctuations ‘in global relations of intimacy, complicity and proximity’ involves for the poet Dionne Brand, who sets herself this task in her long poem, Inventory, and for the critic who reads her work fully attentive to the historical legacies of humanism and their entanglements with the humanities and the humanitarian. 1 Beyond merely tracking such changes, however, I subscribe to Simon Gikandi’s belief that ‘the role of the critic,’ at least in part, ‘is to make literature the medium of problematization.’ Literature itself, he suggests, ‘problematizes experiences which might appear to us to be easily accessible and consumable’ (4). But, as he goes on to observe, these attempts at problematizing literature risk co-option when translated into the institutional contexts provided by disciplines, the media, and the university. The call for papers for this special issue asked two related questions that I want to pursue here: ‘What good is the study of literature?’ and ‘How does the turn to ethics position literary criticism in relation to politics?’ While it is not possible to answer these questions definitively, I follow Brand’s lead into registering the visceral force of the kinds of global intimacies enumerated by Braidotti to ask what these practices imply for the political projects of citizenship and community in contemporary times. I argue that to fully grasp the implications of how Brand’s poetry engages and is engaged in these emerging global complicities, critics need to attend to the experiential dimensions of its affect as well as its explicit meaning. 2