Starred review from September 9, 2024
In this scintillating literary analysis, Canadian poet Brand (Nomenclature), who grew up in Trinidad, examines depictions of imperialism in works by Charlotte Brontë, William Thackeray, and other British writers. English imperialist fiction assumes a white audience and inculcates a perspective that takes white supremacy as given, Brand contends, discussing how she identified with white protagonist Amelia Sedley while reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair as a preteen, only to experience “shock” upon rereading the book as an adult that she had no memory of the Black and Indian characters on the novel’s periphery. She argues that the normalization of slavery was often achieved by relegating it to the background, recounting how as a child she had been entranced by Mr. Rochester’s opulent lifestyle in Brontë’s Jane Eyre and only later realized it stemmed from his involvement in the slave trade. Elsewhere, Brand critiques how racial “difference is both valorized and pathologized” in Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave, and how Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe treats its white protagonist’s enslavement as unjust while regarding the enslavement of nonwhite people as acceptable. Brand’s piercing analysis is at once sweeping and deeply personal, shedding light on how English literature whitewashed imperial conquests one reader at a time. It’s a potent reevaluation of the British literary canon. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency.