Introduction

This Special Issue joins a host of recent conversations in Caribbean literary studies that seek to understand the representation of gender and sexual identity in contemporary Caribbean narratives. These emerging discussions were very much in evidence at the 34th annual Caribbean Studies Association conference in 2009 in Kingston, Jamaica. That conference, Centering the Caribbean in Caribbean Studies, sought to engage critically with the increasing tendency to study the region from outside, either in terms of geography, since many scholars teach and research the Caribbean from centers in North America and Europe, or conceptually, through the use of theoretical paradigms considered nonnative to the archipelago. In light of the history of colonialism in the region, scholars of Caribbean literature are understandably cautious about the potential imperialism of dominant modes of Western literary study that might assume Eurocentric notions of the subject and categories of gender and sexuality that have their basis in Western epistemologies. This caution, however, does not mean a rejection of many of the questions posed by queer studies and feminism. In the Anglophone Caribbean, the last few decades have seen more women writers being published than men, and there has been a similar increase in the amount of critical attention paid to the field of Caribbean women’s writing. This critical attention often engages with central tenets of second and third wave feminism, including the insistence that women writers past and present be included in the canon and arguments for understanding gender and sexual identity as intersectional categories, as M. Jacqui Alexander argues in her important intervention Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred

Aesthetics · Archipelago · Caribbean art · Caribbean literature · Colonialism · Feminism · Human sexuality · Identity (music · Literature · Narrative · Queer · Sociology · Anthropology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Urban and Rural Development Challenges · Gender Studies · History