The liberal humanist vision of the world imagines society on a slow, yet progressive march toward a more egalitarian, equitable, and free version of itself. Yes, there are the unfortunate missteps, the violent histories, and the regrettable mistakes, but our overall trajectory is toward greater freedom. It is out of such hopeful visions of the world that we get the Instagram progressivism of Trudeau 2.0 and the mantras of “Because it’s 2015,” and “Yes we can!”
Dionne Brand has long been a voice of staunch correction and opposition to this liberal optimism. Since her earliest work in the 1970s and 1980s, Brand has been interrogating the myths at the heart of such liberal narratives as well as the languages in which we tell them. Her work questions the “we” invoked in these fantasies, asking who is marginalized in this narrative, whose voices silenced, what histories erased, and whose...
Paul Barrett is an assistant professor in the English department at Concordia University. He is the author of Blackening Canada: Diaspora, Race, Multiculturalism. He writes on topics of race, digital humanities, and public culture in Canada.
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