Grammar of Dissent

Lisa A. Dickson teaches English at McMaster University in Hamilton.

M. Nourbese Philip, Dionne Brand, and Claire Harris are all concerned
with what Philip calls “the anguish that is English in colonial
societies.” It was this common concern that motivated Carol Morrell to
bring the three writers together in this anthology, which offers an
extensive sampling of their prose fiction, essays, and poetry.

In her scholarly introduction, Morrell characterizes Philip, Brand, and
Harris as women of color who have “made a strength out of the
experience of multiple displacements.” Speaking for their history and
“on behalf of their people,” they exhibit, in Morrell’s view,
similar strategies of representation and resistance—locating a
coherent self in an existentialist and politically active subject,
“interrogating” standard English, and bringing to their works the
vibrancy and subversive potential of vernacular speech.

This anthology is aimed at a scholarly audience that is familiar with
the contemporary debate about race, class, gender, and representation,
but that may be encountering these writers for the first time. Extensive
bibliographies include each writer’s own corpus as well as background
texts dealing with the contemporary intellectual debate.