Blank: Essays and Interviews

Literary Nonfiction. BLANK is a collection of previously out-of-print essays and new works by one of Canada's most important contemporary 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, BLANK explores questions of race, the body politic, timeliness, recurrence, ongoingness, art, 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. "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 "M. NourbeSe Philip's is the voice of a Canadian poet-prophet . . . 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. In Canada. Not just South of the border or in other places across the world . . . Philip has been and continues to be, in her own words in BLANK, the 'disappeared and unembedded' poet of our amnesiac times; to read her is to understand how we might survive the ravages of racism, cultural conflict, and geopolitical violence of the 21st century. This is an urgent task . . . We need(ed) this book. We need(ed) to listen. Philip, in BLANK, has given us the gift of another opportunity. We need(ed) to take it. If not now, when?"--Dr. Richard Douglas-Chin "In BLANK 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 "Philip's questions are difficult, and of an intensity of insistence rarely achieved." --Erin Mour "Those still confused about why poetry might fracture and splinter and stutter can find an answer in the work of M. NourbeSe Philip." --Juliana Spahr