SOURCE: Hunter, Lynette. “After Modernism: Alternative Voices in the Writings of Dionne Brand, Claire Harris, and Marlene Philip.” University of Toronto Quarterly 62, no. 2 (winter 1992/1993): 256-81.

In the following essay, Hunter compares Brand with writers Claire Harris and Marlene Philip as outsiders writing within the structures of the dominant discourse while articulating the ways in which their experiences have typically been excluded from that discourse.

As Lorris Elliott notes in the introduction to Literary Writing by Blacks in Canada, there has been an ‘outburst of literary activity by Blacks in Canada’¹ since the 1970s, and the three writers discussed here are part of that ‘outburst.’ Some of this recent activity² comes from Canadian-born writers such as Maxine Tynes and George Elliott Clarke, part comes from immigrants from the United States, England, South America, and Africa, and part comes from the community arriving from the Caribbean.³ Dionne Brand, Claire Harris...