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

Chairs:

Nikoli Attai, Binghamton University

Cornel Grey, Western University

Jade Nixon, New York University

Ryan Persadie, University of Toronto

This panel explores the embodied, felt, and performative dimensions of Caribbean diasporic and queer mobilities, foregrounding the rich intersections of race, gender, sexuality, music, and memory. Attuned to the lived experiences and cultural expressions of queer diasporic subjects across transnational spaces, this panel offers a set of interdisciplinary inquiries into how movement (i.e., forced and chosen, corporeal and symbolic) shapes identity, relationality, and resistance. Drawing on scholarship in cultural studies, performance theory, Black and transnational feminism, and queer diaspora studies, we examine different ways in which a Caribbean sense of place is enacted and reimagined: from accounts of Black queer migration to Canada during moments of crisis and queer desires for belonging; to the pleasures and politics of women's friendships forged through the rhythmic circulations of soca on cruise ships across the Atlantic; to the hybrid performance aesthetics of chutney soca and drag as spaces of Afro-Asian queer intimacies; to the emergent queer Caribbean archives that document the lived realities and activist efforts of trans and LGBTQ+ communities across the region. Together, these papers highlight how mobility is not merely a matter of movement across borders, but a dense terrain of cultural production, affective labour, and embodied knowledge. They argue that diasporic and queer Caribbean subjects reconfigure dominant narratives of migration, health, and belonging through creative and critical practices that are at once deeply rooted and radically transgressive.

Keywords: Queer Diaspora; Caribbean Mobilities; Black Feminism; Transnational Belonging; Performance and Intimacy