“Gathering what is left”: Epistemic Fugivity in Ariana Brown’s We Are Owed.

• In Event: Feminist Memoir, Autobiography, Autoethnography

Abstract

In this paper, I place Ariana Brown’s We Are Owed. in conversation with Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return, demonstrating how Brown charts a new course in Mexican (American) studies through an engagement with Black Caribbean intellectuals. Brown builds upon Brand’s concept of “gathering what is left,” that is, making community and archive through imagining not only what might have been. Through this, she begins to forge a new map toward a decolonial future by delinking from discourses that obscure her pain, pleasure, and capacity to love.

Presenter

• Joshua Ryan Deckman, Stetson University