Spirit Possession and the Transformation of Space in the Fiction of Dionne Brand
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyzes Brand’s short story “Blossom” in light of Freud’s notion of the uncanny. As I argue, Brand invokes the uncanny to illustrate that in a country like Canada, with a history of arrivals and departures, the trope of haunting is a particularly useful way to think about the relationship between history and memory, about displacement, about ancestors, and about inheritance. My contribution to the discussion of the role played by haunting in Brand’s corpus lies in suggesting that her fiction is not solely informed by embodied experiences of trauma and dispossession. Instead, I argue that Brand’s early engagement with Afro-Caribbean understandings of spirit possession, evident in her first short story collection Sans Souci, provides the foundation for her critique and transformation of the racist, classist, and sexist dimensions of Toronto’s urban space. While scholarly accounts of Brand’s work informed by Western paradigms of poststructuralist performance and trauma theory remain helpful, Brand’s fictions exceed these paradigms because they self-consciously explore the muted consciousness of volatile, possessed female bodies and, in so doing, demonstrate a profound knowledge of alternatives to Western epistemology and ontology afforded by Afro-Caribbean possession rituals and spiritual traditions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".