Polymorphic Island Intimacies: The Fluid Queeribbean Quotidian in Anglophone Caribbean Multi-Island Nation-States

Abstract

This project intervenes in the fields of Caribbean studies, queer theory, gender and sexuality studies, and feminist cultural studies. Divided into four chapters, the project examines the interconnections between Caribbean (im)material cultures of fluidity and the politics of quotidian island life. Through an interrogation of three conceptual frameworks: (i) the Queeribbean quotidian, (ii) fluidity, and (iii) ‘the polymorphic’ multi-island nation, the first chapter argues that fluidity generates multiple ideological paradoxes which prove useful in the (re)construction of more equitable island societies in matters of freedom and bodily autonomy. In the second chapter, close readings of Harold Sonny Ladoo’s Yesterdays (1974) and Clem Maharaj’s The Dispossessed (1992), reveal ongoing and generative tensions between rurality, queerness, and post-indenture Indo-Caribbean life in Trinidad and Tobago. Quotidian rural life productively incorporates fluidity into the making of early-twentieth century, hetero-monogamous Indo-Caribbean lifeworlds. The third chapter offers close readings of Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John (1985) and My Brother (1997), in addition to select contributions by emerging Caribbean writers in the online journal Intersect (2020), to demonstrate that fluid, Afro-Queeribbean narratives reveal an interconnected epistemology of the self and the multi-island nation in late-twentieth, early-twenty-first century Antigua and Barbuda. The fourth and final chapter is primarily occupied with the public-facing writings of the queer Vincentian author and scholar, Professor H. Nigel Thomas. Following Thomas’s debut novel Spirits in the Dark (1993), a distinct record of the queer Vincentian quotidian is tied to the local print media culture in the early 21st century. I piece together this record, and by extension the public presence of ideas and practices concerning queerness and fluidity, by close reading three decades of exchanges in Searchlight, The News, and The Vincentian newspapers.