Carmona-Rodríguez, P: Discourses of Dissent

Discourses of Dissent constitutes the first book-length study of Marlene NourbeSe Philip‘s work. Poet, playwright essayst and novelist, Philip (Tobago, 1947-) has extensively written on the meaning of blackness in Canada and the Caribbean, and the experiences of those transported across the Atlantic, either in the form of the vicious uprooting of slavery or as participants in the contemporary process of diaspora. All the way along She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1987) and Looking for Livingstone, An Odyssey of Silence (1991), Philip articulates a particular discourse of dissent based on creatively mapping the experiences supressed by slavery and cultural displacement or, on the attempt at reconstructing the silence presumably existing in Africa before the European colonisation. The strategic parallax for such an intention is provided by the shifting location engendered by diaspora and transculturation, two axes from which Philip‘s prose and poetry refuse easy categorisation, as the subjects of her poetic work also do.