The Queer Caribbean Speaks

The Queer Caribbean Speaks is an ambitious, complex exploration of multiple interpretations of same-sex sexuality and queer life across a range of lgbtq (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer) people in the Anglophone Caribbean, as well as their descendants.Campbell's intent is to render visible, and even more legible, the knowledge production concerning what he refers to as "Caribbean queerness" (p.8).For him, the complexity of Caribbean queerness is often problematically viewed through the lens of Western white definitions, at once stigmatized and short-sighted.He argues that queer people in the Caribbean navigate their queerness in ways that are underrecognized, freer, and open in spite of the entrenched social violence and sociopolitical limitations.His pursuit of a transformative dialogue about social justice and legitimacy of identities is relentless.Nevertheless, his probing approach creatively yet carefully argues against the idea that queerness as experienced within the Caribbean context is solely trapped by "danger" and instead moves to reframe the making of queer Caribbean life.By interrogating notions of "full" citizenship for lgbtq folks in/from the Caribbean, Campbell's method of working through question-and-answer-style interviews becomes an instrumental approach to reimagine the contextual worlds constituting sexual subjectivities and lgbtq identity formation.The analytical potential of combining thirteen interviewees, both men and women, with each interview "standing on its own" (p.11), can deepen our discussion of the way in which the Caribbean is a site of, as Jafari S. Allen put it in 2012, "black/queer/diaspora work" ("Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture", glq 18, his emphasis).These interviews explore resistance, advocacy, freedom, violence, memory, and affect.As a collection of narratives, the book offers insights into Campbell's framing of the familiar as queer by grappling with participants' novels, activist leadership, artistic productions, and intellectual lives.By engaging these somewhat privileged ontologies, he meets his goal of challenging stigma and homophobia.While grounded in different Caribbean contexts such as Jamaica, the Bahamas, and Guyana, the documented re-imaginations of past, present, and future in no way mark the Caribbean as seamless.In fact, the fragmenting of the Caribbean as negotiated landscapes ruptures the modes of recognition of its sexual and gendered subjects as antiviolence charters.Therefore, my summary attempts to avoid erasing the influential framing of these sensitive metanarratives as archives of oral histories.The multiplicity of metanarrative con

Diaspora · Human sexuality · Lesbian · Queer · Sociology · Transgender · African Sexualities and LGBTQ+ Issues · Gender Studies · History

• Nou Mache Ansanm(We Walk Together)

  Derek A Chapman, Dasha A Chapman et al.•Women & Performance a journal of…•2017

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