SOURCE: McCallum, Pamela, and Christian Olbey. “Written in the Scars: History, Genre, and Materiality in Dionne Brand's In Another Place, Not Here.” Essays on Canadian Writing 68 (summer 1999): 159-82.

In the following essay, McCallum and Olbey discuss the historical context of In Another Place, Not Here, suggesting that the distant past associated with slavery informs the more recent past represented in the narrative.

In January 1794, during the heart of the Parisian winter, three new deputies from the Caribbean colony of San Domingue arrived to take their seats in the Convention governing revolutionary France. The three men—a Black former slave who had bought his freedom, a mulatto, and a white—were welcomed by the fraternal embrace of the president and the applause of the French deputies, one of whom commented to the assembly: “Since 1789 the aristocracy of birth and the aristocracy of religion have been destroyed; but the aristocracy...