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Loss and Melancholia: Dionne Brand’s Disquisition on Vietnamese Refugees in the Canadian City

초록/요약

Through the topoi of loss and melancholia, this paper will explore Toronto’s third Poet Laureate, Trinidad-born Dionne Brand’s fourth novel What We All Long For (2005), specifically related to the Vietnamese refugee characters Tuan and Cam. While the refugee experience can be situated more broadly within the processes of displacement, migration, and settlement attendant with immigration, there are additional losses for refugees compounded by their traumatic flight from the homeland and their volatile status in their countries of relocation. For refugees, the loss of their former selves generates a condition of melancholia, since they are barred from sustaining their previous identities as well as from accessing new, replaceable objects because of their racial acculturation and assimilation distinctively as refugees. At the same time, in such context where melancholia is an externally imposed, racially-induced condition, melancholic attachment can be defiant self-preservation, remembrance, and recognition—“another, a parallel story, a set of possible stories” to the official story.

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