Love Enough! Dionne Brand and Rosi Braidotti's Affective Transpositions
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Love Enough! Dionne Brand and Rosi Braidotti’s Affective Transpositions affects and passions; a call for love as a mode of action Libe García Zarranz is Associate Professor in that can reorient the system by embracing our potentia Literature in English in the Department of Teacher as feminist subjects. Education at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU, Norway). She is also Research Résumé Affiliate for the Canadian Literature Centre at the Cet article engage le dialogue entre le roman de Dionne University of Alberta (Canada), Scholar in The Pierre Brand, Love Enough (2014), et la philosophie vitaliste Elliott Trudeau Foundation, and member of the de Rosi Braidotti, telle qu’illustrée dans l’étude Transpo- international research project “Bodies in Transit: sitions: On Nomadic Ethics (2006). J’examine comment Making Difference in Globalized Cultures.” She is the la poétesse tout comme la théoricienne insistent sur la author of TransCanadian Feminist Fictions: New Cross- centralité des relations affectives dans la transformation Border Ethics (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2017). She has also de la subjectivité, des alliances politiques et des espaces published and edited special issues on Canadian and éthiques dans le cadre de processus de mondialisation American literature, transnational studies, feminist and déséquilibrée, de néolibéralisme rampant et de réac- queer theory, affect, and film. García Zarranz has held tions féministes. La poésie matérielle transfrontalière de postdoctoral positions at the University of Innsbruck Dionne Brand propose des figurations alternatives du (Austria) and the Centre for Globalization and Cultural sujet par le biais d’exercices de répétition créative, qui Studies at the University of Manitoba (Canada). Prior zigzaguent entre les cadres temporels et spatiaux, pour to joining NTNU, she taught critical theory and gender signaler la constante transformation des corps phy- studies at the University of Cambridge (Magdalene siques, politiques et sociaux. Les mouvements transpo- College, UK). sables de Brand suivent un modèle similaire à celui des cartographies nomades de Braidotti en ce sens qu’elles Abstract résistent toutes deux à un retour naïf à la sentimenta- This article puts Dionne Brand’s novel, Love Enough lité ou à l’amour nostalgique pour préconiser plutôt un (2014), in conversation with the vitalist philosophy of tournant vers des affects et des passions durables; un ap- Rosi Braidotti, as illustrated in the study Transpositions: pel à l’amour comme moyen d’action qui peut réorien- On Nomadic Ethics (2006). I look at how both poet ter le système en embrassant notre potentiel en tant que and theorist insist on the centrality of affective sujets féministes. relations in the transformation of subjectivity, political alliances, and ethical spaces under processes of uneven globalization, rampant neoliberalism, and feminist backlash. Dionne Brand’s cross-border material poetics proposes alternative figurations of the subject through exercises of creative repetition, zigzagging between temporal and spatial frameworks, signaling the constant transformation of material, political, and social bodies. Brand’s transposable moves follow a similar pattern to Braidotti’s nomadic cartographies in that both resist a naïve return to sentimentality or nostalgic love to advocate instead a turn to sustainable Atlantis 38.2, 2017 47 www.msvu.ca/atlantis Sometimes you have to catch a feeling right also running from femininity. The responses from these away… transCanadian writers, though remarkably different at Dionne Brand, Love Enough first glance, are both saturated by affective configurations (26) that simultaneously locate and dislocate the subject. Following Smaro Kamboureli and Roy Miki (2007), I To talk about love in the context of the redeploy the formulation transCanadian to refer to a humanities, might seem, to some, an exercise of cruel number of contemporary feminist and queer writers optimism (Berlant 2011). The so-called academic- in Canada whose twenty-first-century work proposes industrial complex is saturated with fear and anxiety; new ways to think about location and subjectivity austerity policies have led to brutal funding cuts, alongside and beyond national and transnational dramatically increasing the levels of competition, and discourses.2 As I argue elsewhere, the designation exacerbated feelings of doubt and uncertainty among transCanadian functions as a border concept, which is sessionals, adjuncts, and other exhausted labourers who “construed relationally through an inseparable mixture seek permanent jobs or some form of economic stability. of coalitions, ruptures, entanglements, tensions, and This neoliberal model of the corporate university alliances” (García Zarranz 2017, 9). In this article, the disseminates and capitalizes on these negative affects role of affect in this matrix of forces is of particular with important ethical consequences. The inextricable interest. nature of affective relations, economic processes, and Translating the subject geographically, as these cultural practice is thereby unquestionable. And yet, I writers’ words illustrate, already entails a form of firmly believe this is precisely why it is key for the critic, affective transposition, which is inevitably intertwined the teacher, and the public intellectual today to find ways with economic, political, and cultural processes. Note to activate their passions in the search for change and that I want to think about the concepts of moving and transformation. Let me clarify what I am talking about being moved in a geo-affective sense in an attempt when I talk about love. I am certainly not advocating to discern a number of ethical implications for the for a naïve return to sentimentality or nostalgic love, subject, in particular, the feminist subject. The passion but a turn to sustainable affects and passions; a call for to move, to create, to imagine, to desire new fictions, love as a mode of action that can reorient the system new subjectivities, new bodies has been a constant in by embracing our potentia as feminist subjects. Here the work of feminist philosopher Rosi Braidotti. Since I follow the tradition of vitalist philosophy that reads the publication of her first book,Patterns of Dissonance: passion as an assemblage of forces and flows imbued An Essay on Women in Contemporary French Philosophy with paradoxes, tensions, and contradictions (Deleuze (1991), Braidotti has forcefully formulated alternative 1988; Braidotti 2006a, 2006b). It is crucial then to conceptualizations of difference beyond the dialectical reactivate our passions to rethink what we love and and opposition between individual liberalism and the risk why we love it; in other words, what moves us. of postmodern relativism. Through her pioneering In my case, my orientation towards feminist work on nomadic ethics, Braidotti has revolutionized writing and critical theory has shaped my teaching and our understanding of subjectivity by proposing a theory research practices for the last few years. In turn, I have of affirmative politics and ethics that revolves around also been curious about what moves poets, writers, the following question: “can gender, ethnic, cultural and theorists in their creative interventions. The Irish or European differences be understood outside the Canadian writer Emma Donoghue is often asked about straightjacket of hierarchy and binary opposition?”3 the reasons why she moved to Canada almost twenty Terms such as sustainable ethics, non-unitary years ago. Her answer is “love,” in particular, “love of subjectivity, vitalism, and transpositions become only a Canadian.”1 When Makeda Silvera (1995) asked the a few of the common denominators in Braidotti’s on- poet Dionne Brand why she left Trinidad for Toronto going quest for a sustainable feminist ethics that will in 1970, she replied “To run away, to escape” (165). challenge, as she repeatedly claims, “conservative Brand then explained how she was running scared as nostalgia and neo-liberal euphoria” simultaneously a young woman; escaping the history around her; and (2013, 11). Atlantis 38.2, 2017 48 www.msvu.ca/atlantis This article puts Dionne Brand’s latest novel, More in line with Braidotti than with Gayatri Spivak, Love Enough (2014), in conversation with the Braidotti’s novels, such as What We All Long For (2005), or the feminist philosophy, as illustrated in the study more recent, Love Enough (2014), mobilize a set of Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (2006b). Drawing affective relations where the vitality and toxicity of life on queer and anti-racist theories of affect (Ngai 2005; is always at the centre. I here follow feminist Deleuzian Ahmed 2004), I examine how both poet and theorist philosophy, which refers to Life as an assemblage of insist on the centrality of affective relations in the intensities, full of the vitalism of both bios and zoe transformation of subjectivity, political alliances, and as forces shaping the social fabric of contemporary ethical spaces under processes of uneven globalization, times. In contrast to bios, which stands for the organic, rampant neoliberalism, and feminist backlash. I focus political, and discursive portions of life reserved particularly on how Brand and Braidotti think through for anthropos, zoe refers instead to the affirmative the concept of transpositions, a term in music that power of human and nonhuman life; “a vector of “indicates variations and shifts of scale in a discontinuous transformation,