Bla_K is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works
by one of Canada's most important writers and thinkers.
Through an engagement with her earlier work, M. NourbeSe Philip comes to
realize the existence of a repetition in the world: the return of
something that, while still present, has become unembedded from the
world, disappeared. Her imperative becomes to make us see what has gone
unseen by writing memory upon the margin of history, in the shadow of
empire and at the frontier of silence.
In heretical writings that work to make the disappeared perceptible,
Bla_K explores questions of timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art,
race, the body politic, and the so-called multicultural nation. Through
these considerations, Philip creates a linguistic form that registers
the presence of what has seemingly dissolved, a form that also imprints
the loss and the silence surrounding those disappearances in its very
presence.
Praise for Bla_K: Interviews and Essays
Poet, Essayist, Novelist, Playwright, Public Intellectual: M. NourbeSe
Philip is the principal--and most principled--woman-of-letters in
English right now. Her every word is a must-read because she writes
nothing that doesn't change everything. She isn't politic; she's
political. Unabashedly. Her ruthless truth-telling is page-turning and
paradigm-overturning.--George Elliott Clarke, Parliamentary Poet
Laureate (2016-17)
To read Blank--new essays as well as selected writings from her 1994
collection Frontiers--is to understand that Philip, in habitual
eloquent and poetic prose, was warning us in 1994 about the dystopia of
right-wing populism, violent racism, and virulent sexism we witness
unfolding right here, right now in 2017. --Dr. Richard Douglas-Chin,
Associate Professor, Department of English, University of Windsor
In Bla_K: Interviews and Essays M. NourbeSe Philip shares how the
lonely impossibility of black is an articulation of black life. This
collection, a gathering of her past and present essays on black
diasporic politics, tracks how Philip's poetics emerge from exile--the
ungrieveable middle passage and the wreckage of empire enveloping us
all, globally. Here we must sit with the inflexible logics of racial
capitalism, unfolding in Canada and elsewhere, as these logics are
re-languaged by Philip as poetic diasporic struggle. Philip's insights
on how race and racism emerge in and beyond Canada, in the form of
staged and unstaged misrepresentation, are enmeshed with a politics of
(longstanding) refusal that animates the black diaspora. --Katherine
McKittrick, Associate Professor, Department of Gender Studies, Queen's
University
