Salvage Quotes

“To my mind, these futuristic works are a continuation of the racial imaginary of late seventeenth-, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century works of literature by writers like Aphra Behn, Daniel Defoe, William Thackery, Jane Austen and Emily, Anne and Charlotte Brontë. Those earlier works and their subjects foregrounded individualism, middle-class making, religiosity and industry—which were, no doubt, their concerns but were also the patina over the colonization/education/eradication/exploitation of the “savages.” Giving these works the imprimatur of great literature indemnified the violence of the bourgeoisie. It couched the extreme violence of chattel slavery, colonization and genocide in what was purportedly benign, in the affects of good manners, proper decorum, high graces, great balls, great passions, great ambition; and it granted licence to ignore those events (in the name of good taste). But in these works you might find, if you read well and closely, the “great historical moments” against which these seemingly domestic dramas took place, and the studied innocence of the deep violence that eradicated populations of Indigenous peoples, that murdered and enslaved millions, that immiserated continents and made fortunes.”
― Dionne Brand, Salvage: Readings from the Wreck

“Mine is not an argument about being “absent” from literary texts; we were not absent. We were in the texts. Potent as life. But we (and others) were trained to remove or skirt our presence, or to observe that presence as something like background, immutable, not subject to the action of the text.”
― Dionne Brand, Salvage: Readings from the Wreck