The Crisis of Love in Dionne Brand’s Love Enough

Abstract

This chapter argues that Dionne Brand’s novel Love Enough (2014) appears as an inquiry into the contemporary ethics and politics of love as practiced in the Canadian global city of Toronto. Together with the dismal depiction of an indifferent city, Love Enough hints at the possibility of creating Toronto’s urban space as the site for human sociability and cooperation directed at communal survival and self-fulfillment through the exploration of the interaction of various kinds of love, including Agape, Eros, Philia and Storge. For the analysis of love as an affective and political tool that combines romanticism dreaming with the awakening of political consciousness in the novel, this paper draws on the work of critical theorists Terry Eagleton, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, Slavoj Žižek, Michael Hardt, Rosi Braidotti, Franz Fanon, George Elliott Clarke, and bell hooks.