Queer Caribbean Literature

Description:  The Caribbean is commonly regarded as one of the more hostile regions on earth for LGBTQ people – and, indeed, legal proscriptions and social norms in many countries make life difficult for Caribbean citizens whose sexual identities, sexual practices, and/or gender expressions are non-normative. Further, for many decades the lives and experiences of Caribbean LGBTQ people were largely omitted from (or misrepresented in) the public discourse and literary/cultural production of most Caribbean territories. However, these conditions are changing, and – as attested by the partial list of texts below – Caribbean writers, filmmakers and scholars are both involved in and responding to these changes.

In this course we will consider a selection of the cultural and intellectual production that engages centrally with the Caribbean LGBTQ community. While considering the texts as cultural and literary artifacts in their own right, we will also situate them within broader socio-political contexts that are shaped by (among other issues) the region’s colonial history and contemporary post-colonial/neo-colonial status; the considerable diversity and differentiation within and between Caribbean countries and peoples; the relationship of the region’s LGBTQ communities to LGBTQ communities elsewhere, and the ways in which that relationship is shaped by race, class, and national identification; questions of naming and self-naming; and other questions that we will arrive at and generate together. Throughout the course we will strive to attend carefully and respectfully to the stories, experiences and lives of Caribbean LGBTQ people, while also resisting the temptation to posit the Caribbean as a uniquely and inherently homophobic space and therefore incapable of participating in global political modernity.

Readings:  Texts may include Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night, H. Nigel Thomas’s Spirits in the Dark, Patricia Powell’s Pagoda, Lawrence Scott’s Witchbroom, Achy Obejas’s Memory Mambo, Mayra Santos Febres’s Sirena Selena, Dionne Brand’s In Another Place, Not Here, Thomas Glave’s Whose Song?, Nicole Denis-Benn’s Here Comes the Sun, the films Children of God, Strawberry and Chocolate, and Mala Mala. These will be supplemented by selected essays from Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, and critical/theoretical writing by Glave, M. Jacqui Alexander, Mimi Sheller, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, and others.