Cornel Bogle and Linzey Corridon
"A dance better than geography": Reading Queer Imaginaries in the Works of Andre Bagoo, Faizal Deen, and Colin Robinson

Abstract:
In a 2017 column for the Trinidad Guardian titled “Imagining Leaving,” the late Colin Robinson argues that queer activism in the Caribbean ought to be concerned with “teach[ing] ourselves to widen our imagination to encompass the change we need to realise to live here” than holding out that we will be “guaranteed rescue, by other places, or judges”. In this paper, we read Robinson’s column and his poem “The Man Who Flew” alongside Andre Bagoo’s poem “After Olive Senior, ‘Flying’” and Faizal Deen's "Young Faggot" to consider how these writers employ mythic tropes of ‘flight’ to imagine queer life within and beyond the Caribbean. We argue that for Robinson, the motif of 'flight' signals the loss of intimacies and communities that queer subjects experience when they leave the region. Moreover, we assert that for Bagoo, 'flight' suggests the possibilities of imagining queer life in the Caribbean in ways that transcend pathologizing homophobic narratives of queer being in the region. As two queer poet-scholars from the Caribbean currently residing in Canada, we complement our critical reading of these texts through poetic responses to these texts that consider our own migrations, as well as the affordances and limitations of queer life in the diaspora. Through the creative and critical practices that comprise this paper, we contribute to an understanding of the negotiations of queer belonging made by Caribbean people, both in the region and its diaspora. 
 
Institutional affiliation: University of Alberta (Bogle)
Email: cjbogle@ualberta.ca
 
Institutional affiliation: McMaster University (Corridon)
Email: linzeyc@hotmail.com

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Elizabeth Jackson
Patriarchy and Queer Affiliations in the Contemporary Caribbean Domestic Novel: A Study of Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter and Ingrid Persaud’s Love After Love

Abstract:
The most interesting studies of Shani Mootoo’s novel Valmiki’s Daughter have tended to focus on its challenges to heteronormative conceptions of identity. Agreeing with these readings, I would nevertheless like to pursue a different angle. Comparing Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter with Ingrid Persuad’s much-feted Love After Love, I argue that these two Caribbean domestic novels suggest that conventional disapproval of same-sex desire in Trinidad is rooted very precisely in social anxiety about threats to the patriarchy.
 
Both novels depict families with secrets based on various forms of transgressive behaviour. However, they also portray certain forms of transgression as more socially acceptable than others, precisely because they do not threaten the patriarchy. Examples of these more “acceptable” transgressions include male heterosexual adultery, alcohol abuse, and domestic violence, none of which are really condoned, but all of which are tacitly accepted in the community as normative male behaviour. Indeed, as Evelyn O’Callaghan rightly argues, Valmiki’s “sexual indiscretions with local white women” (with the collusion of his secretary) are “largely a front for his same-sex desire” enacted through a relationship with a working- class black man. The narrative reveals that Valmiki’s wife suffers not so much from his infidelity with the women, but more from her fear of social disapproval because of his same- sex relationship. Similarly, in Love After Love, everyone in the community seems to know about Betty’s abuse at the hands of her brutal alcoholic husband, but they reserve their greatest disapproval for what they call “buller men”. However, Betty’s loving friendship with the closeted Mr Chetan is a prime illustration of the often-observed phenomenon of women and gay men forming supportive alliances with each other because both feel marginalized by patriarchal society.
 
Institutional affiliation: University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Email: elizabeth.jackson@sta.uwi.edu

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Kedon Willis
Neither Here nor Queer:  Battyboys, Bulldaggers and Bugarrons in the Age of Queer Liberalism

Abstract:
In the past decade, there has been a significant shift in the depiction of queer characters by queer and queer-allied Caribbean authors such as Marlon James, Rajiv Mohabir, Nicole Dennis-Benn, Rita Indiana and Gary Victor. This paper examines how these writers, representing diverse nationalities, cultural backgrounds, and even linguistic heritages, have all begun centering stories around mercenary queer characters eager to participate in economies of exploitation that subjugate their fellow citizens. This shift contrasts with a previous generation of writers such as Michelle Cliff whose marginalized queer characters were firmly sympathetic, at times even martyred, in the spirit of aligning them with the postcolonial hopes of their nation. I argue that this shift in queer characterizations by younger writers invites a more intense critique of how the nature of late capitalism in the Caribbean allows for the absorption of some marginalized people as upwardly mobile while still maintaining the alienation of a largely poor and mostly non-white citizen body. However, responding to David Scott’s call to reimagine the emancipatory potential of postcolonial thinking, I show how these writers mobilize the moral failure of their characters to inspire in the reader a historical and personal reckoning that raises a consciousness affectively connecting the Caribbean’s multiple subaltern populations. This consciousness, I argue, is a necessary utopian gesture to conceptualize the overthrow of capitalist logics that create marginalized populations along lines of gender, class, race, and sexuality throughout the Americas.
 
Institutional affiliation: The City College of New York
Email: kwillis@ccny.cuny.edu
 
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Jarrel De Matas
Daylight Come on the Converged Caribbean

Abstract
In Chapter 4 of Diana McCaulay’s Daylight Come, one of the characters Bibi explains that the ‘Convergence’ was when “the worsening climate converged with poverty, history, and geography” (26). Premised on McCaulay’s concept of the ‘convergence’, this paper seeks to contribute to the growing Caribbean scholarship on speculative fiction imaginaries in climate fiction. Through commonly associated tropes of speculative fiction which frame questions of indigeneity, technology, and ecology that are deployed in the novel, Daylight Come offers multiple layers of converging issues to frame McCaulay’s vision of Caribbean futurity.
 
As alluded to by the novel’s title which borrows from the popular Jamaican folksong ‘Day-O’, Caribbean futurity for McCaulay is presented as a grim reality that is identifiable in our present. Where sunlight in the novel has evolved beyond unbearable proportions for the characters and therefore something to be avoided, McCaulay calls attention to the exacerbated climate that is not changing, but has changed.
 
I argue that not only are our present, anthropocentric actions called into question in the novel but also our marginalization of other ‘nonhuman’ groups such as the ‘Tribals’ who are described as ‘like the Tainos’ in the novel. The conflict between the human characters and nonhuman environment and indigenous populations adds greater weight to the layered experiences of convergence played out during the novel.
 
Through a speculative fiction study of indigeneity and the eco-entanglements of humanity and technology, I direct greater attention toward the need to take both literary imaginaries and the present climate crisis more seriously lest the events of Daylight Come become our reality.
 
Institutional affiliation: University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Email: jdematas@umass.edu

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Shareed Mohammed
“A toppled ruined tidal door in the greenhouse drought spectre of earth and sky”: The call for a visionary change of the breach in the ancient vestiges of synchronicity in Wilson Harris’s The Mask of the Beggar.

Abstract:
Wilson Harris claims that there “lingers an unspoken apprehension of an incalculable price to be paid in pollution, in the extinction of species, and in other elemental implosive cycles which leave their shadow upon the psyche of nature” (“Merlin and Parsifal” 62). According to Harris, such ‘cycles’ in nature, are “ancient vestiges of synchronicity” or “acausal” linkages of landscapes, riverscapes, skyscapes and oceanscapes” (“Merlin and Parsifal” 61-62). Harris further claims that these dismembered acausal or quantum links represent a breach in the “profound and unusual treaty of sensibility” (“Profiles” 202) between human presence and the natural environment.  Such treaty was represented in the ancient pre-Columbian world by the mythical Quetzalcoatl or “twinship of sea and sky, vegetation and star” (Harris, “Schizophrenic” 106). Most importantly, readers can trace the sensation of Quetzalcoatl’s acausal linkage of earth and sky in the language of Harris’s The Mask of the Beggar.
 
This paper will demonstrate that Harris’s use of an obscure metaphorical language in The Mask of the Beggar invokes the presence of Quetzalcoatl’s twinship of earth and sky to echo a quality of voice or redemptive cry for the fate of nature. This research will also undertake an evaluation of the explicit correspondence that Harris’s’ ‘ancient vestiges of synchronicity’ achieves with Kamau Brathwaite’s perception of those ‘abstract signals’ or timehri art that exist in the physical landscape. This paper will be guided by Wilson Harris’s shamanistic notion of the pre-Columbian treaty of sensibility, the Ventriloquist of Spirit, the ancient vestiges of synchronicity, and the psychophysical self-corrective medium of communication. The findings of this paper will reveal that the highly difficult metaphoric language of The Mask of the Beggar generate a sacramental awareness of the environment that humanity destroys or consumes in the name of progress.
 
Institutional affiliation: University of the West Indies, St. Augustine
Email: smshareed3@gmail.com
 
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Jovanté Anderson
‘Up Inna the Video Light’: Batty Boy and the Radical Refusal of Recuperation

Abstract:
This essay proposes that the 2020 short film, Batty Boy, provides an opportunity to think the queer implications of Krista Thompson’s theorization of the video light in dancehall sessions. A coming out story set in London, the film charts the turbulent journey of Dolcie, a young British Jamaican man, toward his eventual reconciliation with his sexual and gender identity which culminates in a celebration in the video light at a queer dancehall party.
 
Thompson argues that the video light, often attached to the roaming camera of the party’s videographer, is “intrinsic to the creation of a sense of community among dancehall participants through the modes of seeing and of blindness that it produces and makes visible.” I assert that the film’s use of video light refuses the romance of recuperation and visibility within the national and diasporic community and, instead, charts a space which lingers in the radical potential of abjection to shape the contours of alternative forms of belonging.
 
Finally, therefore, Batty Boy challenges us to think beyond what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “the epistemology of the closet,” a binary structural relation that might reduce Jamaica to the site of a spectacularized homophobia and might reduce its diaspora to a utopian alternative position. Rather, the film offers us a way to think through the possibilities of arranging more complex relationships to space and time in order to more carefully grapple with the often obscured grounds of the queer Jamaican imagination of the future.
 
Institutional affiliation: University of Miami
Email: jaa392@miami.edu
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Andrew Kendall
Filming Heterotopias: Steve McQueen’s Small Axe as a textual, and cultural, survival strategy

Abstract:
Small Axe (2020), Steve McQueen’s long-gestating five-episode anthology TV series recounting the experience of black immigrants in 1960s-1980s Britain, has been hailed for its timely, empathetic representation of West Indian identity on screen. McQueen’s anthology is a rare entry in that medium which explores lives and identities of Black-British Caribbean immigrants, and one of the handful of works that explicitly engages with the Windrush generation. I propose to read McQueen’s series through theories of the cultural relationship between film and literature, by examining how this kind of televisual attention to themes (primarily explored in West Indian literature) is part of an important shift in the ways that West Indian identity is presented in popular culture, and an important part of changing trends in mainstream filmmaking.
 
The anthology as a televisual form has its roots in literary works, and Small Axe’s explores a quintet of discrete stories in a way that recalls collections of West Indian Stories. In examining the collection of stories as a filmic text, I intend to argue that filming the historical relationship between West Indian immigrants and white Britain is a necessary and natural development of film/TV’s emerging prominence as a cultural marker in the Caribbean region, and a valuable medium of presenting Small Axe’s central focus – depicting how West Indian immigrants create heterotopias of survival in a racist British society.
 
In this way, Small Axe becomes a literal and figurative survival strategy articulating the tension of Caribbean assimilation in white spaces: i) the anthology’s exploration of immigrant survival strategies through heterotopias in an imperialistic Britain is dependent on intentional creations of cultural spaces, and ii) McQueen’s anthology as a filmed survival strategy exploring stories of Black British immigrant within a media landscape which still ignores stories of Blackness/Immigrants on screen.
 
Institutional affiliation: University of Guyana
Email: andrew.kendall@uog.edu.gy
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Michelle Ramos-Rodríguez
Project Caribbean Experiment: The Use of Science Fiction in Sr. Langosta’s Music Video ‘Island’s Loophole’

Abstract:
As the world continues to globalize, Caribbean artists utilize the mediums that have othered them in the past to create a space for redefining their experiences and identity. Science fiction is one of them. Accordingly, in their music video “Island’s Loophole,” Puerto Rican fusion band Sr. Langosta accentuates the social conditions of the Caribbean and its people through the use of dystopian worlds, otherworldly creatures, and uninformed experimentation. Sr. Langosta creates a hypothesize world where past problems have magnified, and the Western world continues to decide the future of the Caribbean region and its people in a constantly repeating cycle of exploitation and abuse. By briefly exploring the representations of the Caribbean in science fiction and Afrofuturism, I recognize how the band offers their perceptions on the relationship between the Caribbean and the Western world through their representations of technology and science fiction.
 
Institutional affiliation: Independent scholar
Email: michelleramrod@gmail.com