TOPIA

A meditation on an image in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, in which a young Dionne Brand discovers a book, The Black Napoleon, in the bottom drawer of her grandmother’s wardrobe, and begins to read it. “The Bottom Drawer, or, The Beginning of Reading” is also a meditation on the act of reading as related to tactility, initiation, and transformation; on ancestors and where descendants imagine their ancestors gathering; the pose of the subject in a photograph by Manuel Álvarez Bravo; the influence of The Black Napoleon in Dionne Brand’s writing/life; and the genesis, in reading, of the writer Dionne Brand.

Brandon Shimoda

TOPIA Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies

The Bottom Drawer, or, The Beginning of Reading

《底层抽屉，或，阅读的开始》

Among the narratives recounted in Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, is a story of Rastafari longing for return. This discussion considers that story, told to Brand by a friend, alongside Chronixx’s song “Capture Land” and Nabil Elderkin’s short film, “Captureland.” In reading these works together, I use the concept of “capture land” to engage with the question of the authority of maps. I also examine how these works narrate land, coloniality and the politics of longing and belonging in diaspora and how they each locate Black life in and through different sites and scenes of (dis)orientation.

Ronald Cummings

On Capture Land

在捕获的土地上

This article focuses on the culture and politics of apology for injustice against LGBTQ+ people in the context of Anglo-European, liberal democratic nation-states. I examine the circumstances and limits of Justin Trudeau’s apology for the gay purge and related initiatives since November 2017. I contend that while the normative affective structure of liberal apology mandates a move from mythical homo sorrow to mythical reparation, jettisoned affects, experiences and activism from below exceed the state’s directive for reparation and forgetting. I name such excesses divine queer sorrow. More specifically, I trace the remaindered and peripheral affect of testimonies and activism to think about not only a queer affective structure of forgiveness but also a transformative future stemming from activist sensibilities.

Ian Liujia Tian

Divine Queer Sorrow, or Beyond Mythical Reparations

神圣的酷儿悲伤，或超越神话的补偿

To join Dionne Brand in A Map to the Door of No Return is to take a journey divergent from the West’s well-worn genre of the epic that fetes great white men whose great risks meet with even greater rewards. By contrast, Brand sutures her transatlantic bricolage of time and space with disruptions and displacements. Her redactions and erasures illuminate the efficacy of forgetting in a world where the colonizers have frozen the historical time of Empire in marble, granite, and bronze.

Mabel O. Wilson

Entropic Monuments

熵的纪念碑

Christina Sharpe

Dionne Brand’s <i>A Map to the Door of No Return</i> at 20: A Gathering

迪翁·布兰德的《无归之门地图》20周年：一次聚会

Waed Hasan

Through the Literary and on the Streets: Black Aliveness and #BlackLivesMatter

穿越文学与街头：黑人的生命力与#BlackLivesMatter

Neil Balan

Secrecy and Opacity as Information Imaginary and Datafied Futures Otherwise

保密与不透明作为信息想象与数据化未来的另类选择

This article considers some ways that encounters with everyday objects in a home can generate a feeling of intimacy. The emerging range of “smart” devices marketed to exploit personal connections with the appurtenances of domestic spaces, we argue, effectively make the home into a platform for such intimacy. That intimacy is often achieved through the implied animacy of objects that might otherwise be regarded as asignifying, thereby enabling meaningful narratives to be built up around the likes of toasters and floorboards. The article suggests that such platforms complicate the distinction between public and private spaces, as the makers of smart technologies seek not just to insert their devices into our daily lives, but to make them feel intimate while extracting data about us in return.

Matthew Halm

Chris Ingraham

Asignifying Animacies in the Home

家庭中的象征性活力

Young women’s digital networks have been structured through a carefully cultivated sense of connection and relatability, allowing users to brand themselves as “influencers” and create lucrative beauty and lifestyle content for viewers. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s theory of the “intimate public,” wherein closeness among women is engineered through the implicit mutual attachment to a shared feminine culture, girls’ studies scholars can consider how influencer content enables girls’ digital intimate publics in a post-feminist media culture wherein girls work to cultivate this sense of shared experience. This article explores the challenges, ruptures, and renewals in one such “digital intimate public” in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests. A close analysis of a response to this crisis from a popular “girl-y” YouTuber seeks to understand to how dynamics in this space could directly negotiate these shifts through the utilization of online affordances, girl-oriented vernacular, and commercial strategies. It analyzes intersections of post-racial and postfeminist ideology may intersect in cultivating and renegotiating the affective norms in these girl-oriented spaces.

Victoria Sands

“This Honestly Breaks My Heart”: Black Lives Matter and Reshaping Post-Feminist, Post-Racial Intimacy in Girls’ Influencer Economies

“这真的让我心碎”：黑命攸关与重塑女孩网红经济中的后女性主义、后种族亲密关系

shah noor hussein

“That’s Not the Atlantic”—Remixing Black Queer Diaspora

“那不是大西洋”——重构黑人酷儿散居

Abbreviation
Journal Impact	0.31
Quartiles(Global)	CULTURAL STUDIES(Q3)

Publication Information	Publisher: University of Toronto Press，Publishing cycle: ，Journal Type: journal，Open Access Journals: No
Basic data	Year of publication: 2019，Proportion of original research papers: 100.00%，Self Citation Rate:0.00%， Gold OA Rate: 0.00%

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