Panel 05: Diasporic Currents and Queer Intimacies: Caribbean Mobilities Across Bodies, Borders, and Beats (EN)

Chair: Nikoli Attai (Binghamton University)

15 April, 10:00 am | Room C1

Trinidadian Soundscapes and Female Presence in Selvon and Lovelace

Carlotta Pisano (CETAPS, FCSH, Universidade NOVA de Lisboa)

This paper analyses the representation of women in Sam Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners and Earl Lovelace’s The Dragon Can’t Dance, focusing on carnival, soundscape, and Caribbean diasporic identity. In Selvon’s London, women appear mainly as sexualized and domestic anchors, moulding male migrant subjectivity while remaining peripheral. Yet the novel’s soundscapes, calypso, fêtes, and diasporic energy signal the persistence of Caribbean culture, even as female voices are muted. Lovelace’s Trinidadian setting, by contrast, represents women within carnival, portraying them as active participants whose presence influences community, ritual, and cultural expression. Drawing on Zoran Pečic’s analyses of queerness and performativity in Caribbean diasporic writing and Kate Houlden’s work on gender in postcolonial literature, this paper argues that both texts use sounds as sites to negotiate belonging, while they contrast in gendered representation. Selvon’s women are passive and silent within diasporic celebrations, whereas Lovelace positions them as central to the sonic and performative elements of carnival. Comparing the two works highlights how Caribbean literature engages sound, rhythm, and carnival to express cultural memory, diasporic identity, and the visibility, or absence, of women, revealing the complex interplay of gender, migration, and cultural performance in Caribbean narrative.

Keywords: Caribbean literature; diaspora; soundscapes; performativity; postcoloniality

Going to the Waters: Black Women’s Intimacies with More than the Atlantic

Jade Nixon (New York University)

In this paper, I illuminate Black women’s queer, understood here as non-normative, relationships with waters through their theories of gathering on board the Ubersoca Cruise ship. I argue that participants experience what I conceptualize as feeling and feeling with waters, a practice of seeking interconnection with waters on the ship that is informed by their ongoing relationships with waters on land. In our conversations, participants describe the Atlantic not only as a space haunted by the afterlives of transatlantic slavery but also as a site of felt and sensory relation. As such, they illuminate how their everyday engagements with lakes, rivers, and ponds alongside the Atlantic create life-affirming relations that flow across place. Building on these stories, I offer a more capacious understanding of the Atlantic and other waters as sites of joy and beauty.

Keywords: Black feminist thought; pleasure; Black Atlantic; water epistemologies

Transgressing the Indentured Promise: From a Politics of Harm to Transnational Solidarity

Ryan Persadie (University of Toronto)

My presentation turns to an archive and fieldsite I refer to as "queer fetes", diasporic party-spaces associated (Anglophone) Caribbean carnival practices that emerge out of Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Asian feminist legacies of resistance, emancipation and political consciousness. Focusing specifically on the "queer fete" as a site of anti-colonial and feminist place-making, I interrogate how embodied acts of Indo-Caribbean self- and place-making practices are simultaneously produced through enactments of transhistorical and transnational harm. Following three years of ethnographic fieldwork in these cities, I explore how queer Afro-Caribbean frameworks for LGBTQI+ party infrastructures were consumed by queer Indo-Caribbean party organizers to build distinctly Indo-Caribbean parties, known as “coolie fêtes”, while negating queer Afro-Caribbean participation in these spaces. To showcase the transnational dimensions of this lateral violence when enacted by queer Indo-Caribbean (or what I refer to as "qoolie”) party producers, I offer the conceptual framework of the “indentured promise." The indentured promise describes post-indenture ideologies of social ascension made possible for queer Indo-Caribbean communities through socially reproducing logics of anti-Blackness. At the same time, these performances of lateral violence functioned to maintain division between Indianness and Blackness, producing harmful monolithic readings of queer Indo-Caribbean community space as separate from queer Afro-Caribbean political organizing. Following this, I explore how Indo-Afro relational politics performed within Toronto-based, Indo-Caribbean-led queer parties have been alternatively used to resist such hopeless binaries and enact transnational solidarities, particularly in relation to Palestinian communities impacted by ongoing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. In this way, I discuss how legacies of the indentured promise can be transgressed through performing a cross-racial (queer Indo-Afro) solidarity via singing and dancing to soca music.

Keywords: queer Caribbean diaspora; transnational solidarity; Afro-Caribbean; Indo-Caribbean; Carnival

Intimate Publics, Diasporic Worlds: Queer Caribbean Letters in Motion

Cornel Grey (Western University)

This paper develops a queer epistolary spatial reading practice to explore how queer Caribbean writers in the diaspora use letters, essays, and poems as acts of address that create counterpublics and reimagine belonging. I examine how writing functions as both genre and geography, producing affective and relational spaces that negotiate exile, racialization, and conditional inclusion in the Global North while sustaining complex attachments to the Caribbean. Grounded in Black feminist and queer diaspora thought, I treat the letter as a decolonial and embodied performance that reclaims voice from colonial and heteronormative silences. This paper considers how correspondence transforms resentment, longing, and desire into creative methods of survival, intimacy, and solidarity. By foregrounding writing as a transnational geography of voice, I highlight the political and spatial work of epistolary practice in constructing alternative publics that are both intimate and transnational, expanding understandings of queer Caribbean diasporic life beyond territorial and nationalist boundaries.

Keywords: queer Caribbean diaspora; epistolary practice; affective geographies; counterpublics