Oblique Emotions and Border Intimacies in Dionne Brand’s Theory

The inextricable link between emotion and mobility has been at the core of the fictional landscapes of Black Canadian poet, novelist, and essayist Dionne Brand, including her 2018 award-winning novel, Theory. The ungendered first-person narrator is a PhD candidate on a life-long mission: to finish their doctoral dissertation. Offering a sharp critique of academia, the narrator’s delay in knowledge production mirrors their difficulties to collect themselves emotionally. Constantly unlearning how to do intimacy, the narrator’s speculative practices traverse beauty, desire, and sociality, resulting in a disorienting inventory of what Brand calls ‘oblique affection’ (2018, p. 5). Interweaving Black feminist and queer theory with affect studies, this chapter theorizes these oblique emotions as the result of instances of dis/orientation. I consider formal aspects in the text, such as the use of footnotes, as discursive and affective borderscapes. Following Sara Ahmed (2006), the chapter further analyzes how the various dis/orientations towards liminal spaces in the narrative signal the paradoxical relation between emotion and motion in what I call border intimacies. In Theory, these intimacies are sustained by oblique emotions that are unevenly distributed and that circulate among the characters, shaping the textual, affective, and temporal landscapes they occupy.