Escrevendo do outro lado da porta: escritas de si, neo-arquivo e a fabulação crítica em 'Um mapa para a porta do não-retorno', de Dionne Brand

Abstract

This paper examines Dionne Brand's A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (2022), exploring how the author reconfigures autobiographical writing to represent the Black Atlantic diasporic experience. Drawing on debates surrounding autobiography, life writing, and postcolonial autobiographical practices, the study argues that Brand combines memory, essay, poetry, and historical reflection in a fragmented narrative that challenges linear models of self-representation. Engaging with key scholarship on Brand's work, the article develops a reading based on Erica Johnson's concept of the Neo-Archive and Saidiya Hartman's Critical Fabulation. It contends that Brand transforms the absences produced by the colonial archive into a structuring principle of her writing, using imagination as a critical practice for reconstructing diasporic memory and reimagining forms of belonging.