Frontiers – selected essays and writings on racism and culture 1984-1992

This collection of essays consists of selected writings from Guggenheim Fellow Marlene Nourbese Philip’s wide-ranging appearances in magazines, newspapers, and journals. Biting, elegant, by turns fiercely questioning, magically lyrical, and gently probing, Philip’s examination of contemporary issues of race and culture is always eloquent and commanding.

Editorial review -Amazon

A brilliant and creative mind, Philip emerges here as an essayist of stature. The path each essay takes is never predictable and always courageous. When dealing with her own writing, or with the project of writing as a woman, as black, as African Canadian, as Caribbean, as one insistent on a language as yet undevised, she achieves tremendous lyricism. In this she resembles such essayists as Edouard Glissant or Octavio Paz, who also insist upon the latitude a lucid and elegant prose allows, in order to map a consciousness of region and race, and to write its language.

 

-Lesley Saunders, York University

 Dedicated “for Canada, In the effort of becoming a space of true true be/longing”, these 26 essays address issues as local to Toronto as the “Into the Heart of Africa” exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum and the 1989 PEN conference, as central to Canada as Multiculturalism and as international in scope as the Gulf War and children in South Africa. Most of the essays were originally published in magazines such as Fuse, Now and This Magazine. Some were published in newspapers such as the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail. Whatever the subject or wherever they were published, “Philip makes speech accept the meanings which arise from her experience of being Black and female, from her private and public experience of colonialism… Underlying her work is a deep understanding of the political and exclusionary nature of language”

-Rachel Vigier, Fuse

 

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