What is Jody Mason Reading?

A key aspect of this non-linear temporality is the collection’s insistence that an occluded black past—in the form of figures such as Marie-Joseph Angélique or the fictional Hamidou Diop––will “emerge to shape the future” of Montreal (18). If, like me, you are interested in the complex but underexamined connections of global decolonization movements on the political cultures of late twentieth-century Montreal (explored in academic work by scholars such as David Austin and Sean Mills), you’ll find much to think about in Dominoes. 

Paralleling Kellough’s interest in disjunctive temporality is his experimentation with genre. Some of the texts in Dominoes, for instance, are not fiction but instead borrow from the genres of science fiction (“La question ordinaire et extraordinaire,” the Afro-futurist address of an audience on the 475th anniversary of Milieu, a post-climate apocalypse Montreal in which the northern, largely immigrant, boroughs form a new centre); the personal essay (“Notes of a Hand,” Kellough’s concluding meditation on being the “amanuensis” of his enslaved ancestors); and memoir (“Smoke That Thundered,” which takes readers on a recursive journey through Kellough’s adolescent years, one that culminates in a kind of baptism in Guyana’s Potaro River).