Beautiful the beauty—Dionne Brand's Theory and Canisia Lubrin's Voodoo Hypothesis

Abstract

[EN] Against the reductive and the often universalizing poetics of much poetry and much theoretical discourse that abandons feelings from its rhetoric, the works of Dionne Brand's Theory and Canisia Lubrin's Voodoo Hypothesis promote layered, black and multivocal reflections on beauty. They act out self-interrogating dialectics rather than provide symbolic clarity of their subjects. There is no aesthetic consolation in these works and that's where the beauty lies. Their works ask readers to enter into irreducible complexity as a form of attention. I posit that these black creative politics – in this poetry – are tied up in reading-work that can newly anticipate our global condition through ethical collectivity.