Queer Resistance(s) - Contemporary Caribbean Communality

The project will explore modes of literary and social belonging that resist the lawful oppression of queer people in the Anglophone Caribbean through contemporary literature. This focus is informed by emergent queer visibility, historically framed by the unofficial and violently opposed Kingston Pride of 1989 and the first publicly sanctioned Pride in 2015. I will consider the ways in which increasingly 'official' social visibility has potential critical impact for postcolonial-informed queer theories. Moreover, my project argues that such a critical approach is important for contemporary Caribbean fiction due to the region's historical and literary exceptionalness. In the Caribbean, the colonial past continues to shape the current regulation of sexualities, as evidenced by the continued enforcements of Buggery and Obeah Laws (1861, 1898). My project will examine how multiple literary queer resistances are present in the work of authors including Marlon James, Nalo Hopkinson and Thomas Glave. I will consider how their work dramatises and subverts the notion that sexual difference functions as a 'regulator of society' (Ferguson, 2004) through a production of multiple literary queer resistances via form and content. I will examine this literary queer resistance as ostensibly a private code within contemporary Caribbean literature, accessible exclusively to those 'in-the-know'. This is manifested by a distinctly Caribbean cultural rendering of camp's love of artifice and exaggeration: the similar aesthetic flamboyances of calypso, carnival and dancehall influencing the unconventional forms of contemporary Caribbean literature. The sexual and colonial resistances within these Caribbean literary texts connect to contemporary queer theories, particularly international queer-of-colour critique (Muñoz, Gopinath, Ferguson, Rao, Massad). As such, my critical framework aims to mimic the topography of the Caribbean as separate concepts, converging through a shared belonging, reflecting disparate islands which have become culturally interrelated, due to their colonial and diasporic histories. My current MRes research, 'Fighting Form(s): The Writing of Kei Miller', examines Caribbean queer form, building on my dissertation on queer theory (awarded a High First). I received the Michael Klein Award (given to the best student in American Studies) and English Subject Prize (for the best overall performance in 2018). I presented my undergraduate research at the NTU English Research Fair in 2018. I am project manager of a placement at Nottingham Contemporary, working with other postgraduate students on an anticolonial liberation project. I would relish the opportunity of engaging M4C and external partners (including Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature) on future collaborative projects. Intersectional frameworks for queer postcolonial studies exist (Hawley, 2001; McCormack, 2015). However, there are no studies specific to contemporary Caribbean queer resistance: a relevant critical anthology (Bucknor and Donnell, 2011) contains one chapter specific to queer theory; Houlden's study (2016) is the first of its kind to explore Caribbean same-sex desire and masculinity, while Burns (2012) engages with Francophone texts. Moreover, these studies all focus upon post-war or post-Windrush authors (Clarke, Selvon, Naipaul etc.), rather than contemporary literary texts. My focus on Anglophone Caribbean sexuality builds upon Houlden's exploration on stylistics, as well as relevant work interrogating Western-orientated foci and Caribbean sexuality (Smith, 2011). However, the combination of my chosen historical range, theoretical framework, and focus on queer literary resistance will make my doctoral research distinct from this existing scholarship. Queer resistance is crucial to the Anglophone Caribbean, as the only islands which continue to enforce the Buggery Law are British Commonwealth.