Matthew Chin, "Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica" (Duke UP, 2024)
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Welcome to the new books network.

Hello, everybody, and welcome back to New Books in Caribbean Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm your host, Zach Myers, and today we'll be talking with Matthew Chin about the new book, Fractal Repair, Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica. Matthew, welcome to the show. Thank you, Zach. Thank you so much for having me and the New Books Podcast for hosting this.

The pleasure is all ours. So I thought we could just start by getting a bit more information about you. We just were wondering, could you tell us a bit more about your personal intellectual journey? What led you to become a scholar of the Caribbean? Sure. So I'm Jamaican and grew up in Jamaica. I came of age as a teenager in the 1990s. And growing up, I was always bullied for being soft and being a batty man.

And, um, I just, it wasn't really surprising because at this time, gender or sexual deviance was really vilified in Jamaican popular culture and not just about, um, same gender, um,

same gender desire but also for example oral sex was something that wasn't um that was something i was really frowned upon um at the time i didn't know about you know i was a sheltered upper class teenager and didn't really know about the informal gay scene i didn't know about um jamaican forum for lesbians all sexual and gays which is now um equazi ja and i and i hadn't read you know

you know, Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, which, you know, talks about same gender sexuality. So there was a lot of instances of queerness that were happening in Jamaica. I just wasn't plugged into them, whether that's because of my class situation or being sheltered, I don't know. And I went to, after high school, I went to Canada for college and two things happened there.

One of them was I came into a community of queer and trans folks from across the Caribbean. And so it was really nice to feel a sense of familiarity, even though I was not in the Caribbean.

And then the second thing is I began to feel a sense of resentment against people who, when they would find out I'm Jamaican and find out I'm queer, that they would automatically ask, oh, but isn't Jamaica just so homophobic and, you know, dance hall. And, and even though, you know, I might have shared some of those sentiments, I just, I just felt a sense of defensiveness around that question. And I,

At the time, you know, at this time, you know, I had finished college and I was considering what to do next. And I wanted to be a social worker because I was involved in a lot of kind of organizing initiatives.

But somebody, a mentor who I'm indebted to now suggested I apply to a PhD program. And I did. And I applied to one program. I got into that one program and went. And I wrote my dissertation on queer and trans organizers of color in Toronto. My PhD is in social work and anthropology. So kind of combining the organizing and the anthropology.

And, um, a lot of the people that I worked with in the dissertation were, um, queer and trans Caribbean people. And, um, after I did that project for the next project, I realized that I wanted to, um, work. I wants to connect the work that I've been doing in Canada to the Caribbean. Okay. So I'm working with, you know, Caribbean, queer and trans people here. What does that look like? You know, back in the region itself.

And so you asked me how I came to be a scholar of the Caribbean. So I'm not trained as a Caribbeanist. I had to, you know, I had to really, it was a steep learning curve to figure out what does it mean to do, to engage in Caribbean studies in a serious and critical kind of way. And so initially the book was supposed to be an ethnography and

And I started doing historical research on, I once worked with J-Flag or Now Equality, J-A, and I started doing historical research to say, you know, like what has been written already? And it completely changed that research, completely changed my project because I immediately shifted to history because I said, wow, there's, I found out about the gay freedom movement. And I said, how did I not know about this before?

And so if there are any students that are listening out there, I will tell you this is why it's important to do a literature review because it is necessary. And so that led to the book. So the book, I want to understand gender and sexuality in Jamaica and the diaspora and how it came to shape my experience growing up. But I also wanted to shift that.

the narrative around Jamaican homophobic extremism, that kind of narrative that, that really, whenever people who are not from the Caribbean and not from Jamaica would ask me all that, I just get really defensive and kind of annoyed by that question. And so I wanted to, to write a history that didn't reproduce the structure of this existing narrative, right? So I,

I could, you know, if I wanted to say Jamaica, if I wanted to respond to this idea of Jamaica as extremely homophobic, I can either try to show that Jamaica isn't homophobic or try to explain why it's homophobic. But either of those two things justifies the idea that homophobia is this proper starting point for a history of Jamaica. And I just didn't want to do that.

Because I think for me, in some ways it reproduces the idea of...

of sexual deviance among, you know, formerly colonized and well, still colonized people, people from the global South, black people, people from the Caribbean. Not to say that that research is not important, not to say that, you know, I think that people, so people who are doing work on kind of the roots of homophobia, I think is really important work. I just, I didn't necessarily want to do that work.

So basically, the point I was trying to do is how to write a history that will provide a way to think about Jamaica and Caribbean Kurdish in ways that could be reparative. So that was kind of, that's kind of a long winded answer to your question.

But I think it takes us really, really nicely into the book itself, because I think it's interesting seeing that you moved from a kind of more social work, ethnographic background into something which I think is more historical. But you're thinking very, very hard in the book about what is the nature of history making? What is the nature of history writing? And I think the kind of method that you put forward, and I thought we could use this time to talk a bit about the title of the book. Yes.

Just kind of on two of the words in the title, which is fractal and repair. I want to start with this question about fractals, because in the book, I think you put forward the idea of queer fractals as a method and a theory of Caribbean history making. And I was wondering if you could just break that concept down for us. You know, what do you find about the idea of the fractal or the fractal geometry is a useful thing to think with? And what makes it appropriate in your mind for thinking about sexuality and Jamaica? Right.

Thank you so much. That's, that's, uh,

So it's funny that the idea of Fractal Geometry came to me through Erdene Broadba's beautiful novel, Nothing's Matter. It's an absolutely fantastic novel. And in that novel, the protagonist, her name is Princess. She lives in the UK and she tries to trace her family's history. And she asked her family in the UK and they can't tell her. So they say, go to Jamaica and ask your cousin.

And she goes to Jamaica with this linear kinship chart. And she realizes that this kinship chart cannot account for the different kinds of relationships in her family. And she develops the idea that maybe her family, you know, in its complexity and fulsomeness can best be represented in terms of the mat that her cousin makes. And the mat that her cousin makes takes on the form of a fractal pattern.

And fractals are a kind of geometric pattern that repeat, but always with a difference. And so I wanted to think about Broadba's idea of fractal geometry and history making. But for me, I wanted to kind of use it to think about histories of repair.

And so usually when we think about math and histories of repair, it's usually articulated in terms of arithmetic, which is often described as the art of counting.

And using arithmetic for historical repair usually takes shape in calculating reparations, for example. And this is really, really important for survivors of colonial violence like Jamaica and other parts of the Caribbean and in the global south, because the resources that come from reparations are necessary or not, you know, they're useful, certainly, for material and psychic healing.

And at the same time, colonial violence takes shape through arithmetic. The art of counting, arithmetic is what turns Black bodies into objects, it's what turns, you know, Blackness into commodities in, for example, slave ledgers. And I wanted to think

use fractal geometry as a way to think about histories of repair through a different approach to mathematics. So rather than the art of counting, geometry seeks to describe the properties of bodies in space, so like shape or size.

And so even though I know that you need arithmetic to practice geometry, I think geometry helps us to think about history differently. So it's not about counting out the past differently, like adding a different subject that is missing from the past, but it's about thinking through history in a different shape. Like what it means to think, you know, if geometry is about properties of bodies in space and

And, you know, shape is a geometric way of thinking about properties of the body in space. Like, how do we... What did history look like thinking through the shape of fractal shapes? And I think that this is really useful for thinking about the Caribbean because it's more aligned with Caribbean temporalities. You know, we might think of Benitez Rojo's repeating islands and...

And for me, fractal is actually the shape of repair in Caribbean context. So in the region, repair isn't linear or progressive. So we know that, you know, emancipation has happened, revolution has happened, independence has happened, yet freedom is still not here. The legacies of the plantation continue and the gains are small.

And so for me, this is not to say that freedom struggles and Black power and the fight for reparations don't do anything. I think that those fights are important and necessary. But I do say that more often than not, coloniality continues to shape these experiences and the kinds of

movements that we see that kind of interest towards something that looks like freedom is much smaller. And so for me, fractals are useful because they are, they help us think about repair in terms of the small instances of difference within patterns of repeat. And those small instances of differences where repair can take place.

It shows that history doesn't repeat itself exactly. Yeah, and so I use those sites of difference to think about queerness. And here I'm thinking about queer in terms of the English notion of in the 17th century or something like strange or odd. And I think about strangeness in terms of race, gender, sexuality, and geography.

So J.J. Thomas, in his critique of James Anthony Freud's book, The English in the Caribbean, he wrote this book, Fraudacity, and he criticizes English imperialism and he uses the word queer to kind of hit back at this idea of this kind of anti-Black racism that Freud kind of articulates.

based on race and geography, right? And relationship to empire. But in the North Atlantic people, we, you know, in North America and in Western Europe, you know, queer is used to refer to gender sexuality. So I'm kind of combining those two modes of analysis to think about strangeness or oddness in terms of different kinds of, you know, in terms of race, gender and geography. Yeah.

And so, yeah, sorry, go ahead, Zach. Yeah, I think that really brilliantly answers the question about the repair part of the title as well, which is great. I just wanted to ask as well, just before we kind of move into some of the chapters, I wanted to ask about on the note of history making about your relationship to the archive, because I think that you're not just thinking very hard about the relations of power that structure the archive in different ways.

But in a lot of the chapters that come through in the book, it's quite clear that you yourself have actually done a good chunk of archival work. I'm thinking about oral history interviews that you conducted and your work with the papers from the gay freedom movement. And I guess I just wanted to ask a bit more if you could tell us a bit more about that process for you.

Sure. So actually, I had a whole chapter on this question that I eventually got from the book. But I think the question of archive is really interesting in the Caribbean because, you know, in the colonial era, all the main records, at least for the British, were sent to the UK and it was only the kind of the copies that were kept in the colony.

And so in many ways, what we, what, um, what is left in, in the Caribbean is archival detritus. And, and you can't necessarily go to the libraries in many, um, in, um, at least in Jamaica and ask for, can you show me the queer history section? Like that just doesn't, that doesn't exist. Um, and at the same time, I didn't want to think about the Caribbean in terms of loss or absence. Um,

And so if we think about the archive as a law of what can be said, laws around how queerness is said works differently in different contexts. And I had to figure out how these laws function in Jamaica and basically develop historical reading practice for queerness.

In each of the main chapters, I wanted to tackle a moment in Jamaican history where Jamaicans were in some way trying to engage in acts of repair. So, you know, each of the chapters of the book kind of deal with different facets of that knowledge, body, performance, politics, and each chapter required a different approach to the archive. I had to think about where to look for where queerness is said in each of those moments. So my approach was to take on each moment as a whole.

to find all the possible materials that touched on the moment and then sift through them to see if I could find queer and transness. For all the moments, I combed newspaper coverage to see how queerness takes shape. So I looked at The Gleaner, The Star, The Times, The Jamaica Daily News, Herald, X News. I wanted to see how these events were narrated, but also I loved finding letters to the editor.

The HIV chapter was probably the most sprawling just because there was just so much material. I was looking at, I went to the National Library of Jamaica, but also the Ministry of Health, the Red Cross, the Epidemiological Research Training Unit, Hope Enterprises, which did a whole bunch of HIV AIDS research. I interviewed contact investigators, policymakers, doctors, people who were HIV positive at the time, people who worked at the sexual health hotline.

Um, so it was kind of combining kind of archival research with these interview, um, and then, you know, reading plays and novels. Um, but a lot of the time I was faced with loss. Um, I tried to interview people and we say, yeah, man, yeah, man, we'll talk like next week. And then, you know, I find what they passed or, um,

And it's really interesting because, you know, I think when doing a history project and doing oral history, especially if folks are older or even when they're not, you know, I was like, well, yeah, let me try to interview people who are a bit older. But oftentimes it would be the ones I didn't expect to pass. And it's, you know, oftentimes I would kind of build a relationship with people and kind of

And then it's the suddenness of it is hit in a certain way.

But there was loss of people and there was a loss of kind of a destruction of records, for example. There was a sexual health hotline and they were adamant about we have to destroy these records. I understand that medical records have to be destroyed, but there was a certain urgency around these records that didn't necessarily exist around other kinds of records.

And then there were just some materials I couldn't access. Like literally there were recordings of the National Gym, the NDTC, the National Dance Company, a theater company, and they had pneumatic tapes. And there was literally no machine on the island that I could use to read them. And I sourced every single, like so many different places that it literally just was not possible.

So it really made me think about how we know what we know and how queerness comes to be recorded in Jamaica and how it doesn't come to be recorded, who gets to be recorded and who doesn't get to be recorded, and what are the conditions under which this recording happens or not. So it just, the act of trying to look really made me think about all those questions.

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Yeah, I can see in the book in the moments where you see the reflections that you're having kind of on these different experiences of working on these things, you could base those things come through. And I'm obviously very sad the chapter couldn't make it into the book, it would have been really great to have had the kind of reflection that you've just given us. But I think about what you do start with in the book, though, just kind of moving into the first chapter proper, really is the

You begin, I think, in a really interesting way, which is that you give us a really sweeping history, I think, of queerness and sexuality in Jamaica from its kind of initial colonization by the Spanish in 1494 all the way up to the end of the 20th century. And obviously, that is an

huge span of time so I'm not gonna have to just summarize everything and go through the whole thing but I guess I was just curious about why you wanted to open the book with this kind of overview and maybe just to indicate to some of our listeners both what you were trying to do in that chapter but also what you think of as maybe just a few of the really key moments in this history that might help ground us for those who might not have the knowledge.

Right. So it's funny because this actually was in the introduction. And then when I, you know, I was workshopping the book and the people who are my interlocutors or the people who are so kind enough to read it were like, this is, this chapter is too, it needs to be, it's great. It needs to be a separate chapter. So I cut the methods chapter and put this chapter in there.

But the book felt really contemporary. You know, it's all the main body chapters are in the 20th century and really in the second half of the 20th century. And if I'm going to write a book about history, I knew that I need to give, you know, the second half of the 20th century felt so shallow. I want to give a deeper sense of history. And I want to do that, but also give a sense of,

the fractal feeling, the idea that this, what we see as queerness now has taken shape in different iterations from the very first time that Columbus arrived, you know? So maybe I'll just give like maybe three. So if we think about conquest, you know,

When the Spanish came, they saw the indigenous people as, you know, raised and gendered others and as kind of not human in a way. So their gender and sexuality were served as a way in which to,

mark indigenous people as less than they saw let's lack of adhere adherence to binary gender norms sodomy and immodesty among native women right that was kind of that was kind of a moment um another moment would be kind of um enslavement um you know

enslavement existed under the Spanish and then later the British but then under the British when the plantation system really began to take off we see the lines of race and the in the

the more punitive and harsh system of enslavement. And enslaved Africans couldn't transport their systems of gender and their systems of family to the New World plantation context. Men and women, well, you know,

women were in a sense ungendered as uh spiller says like men and women were assigned the same physical work like literally the only thing that was different was women were allotted some and very minimal if at all kind of um accommodations around reproduction and childbirth um

Even those who escaped the plantation, who fled from the plantation maroons, they had different kind of demographic patterns and they had to change their family systems and gender systems to account for that.

um when europeans entered the new world and they began to um you know spend some time there they changed their sexual and family norms as well and people in europe and in in in um the uk and england would look upon these changed europeans as not proper because their time in you know the tropics or in the caribbean had somehow um

made them less civilized, right? So in many ways, that moment of colonization and enslavement transformed all different... You know, if you think about Aquinas in terms of gender and sexual peculiarity regarding in relation to race, gender, sexuality, and geography, that's definitely the case for all peoples of the Caribbean. Of course, some with much more detrimental consequences than others.

If we look at, you know, I could talk about emancipation, I could talk about indentureship, you know, when under emancipation, oftentimes, you know, people were legally free, but gender and sex became a way to monitor or to index control over, you know, formerly enslaved peoples. We see a massive increase in sexual offenses today.

And we also see, for example, formerly enslaved men use ideologies of masculinity and work to critique elite men. So it's not just one way. It's kind of their ways that, you know, formerly free people use these gender ideologies against colonial authorities. Yeah.

I think actually that's a really, really good history because it takes us up into the, let's say, kind of the beginning of the 20th century, the kind of mid-20th century moment that the chapter, the first chapter that includes a real serious look at a case study, I think, the second chapter, it takes us up to that point. And I think in that chapter, you kind of turn to the institutionalization of a kind of a native, quote unquote, social science tradition in Jamaica in these kind of years leading up to independence.

And so I was just wondering if you could give us a bit of an overview of the development of this tradition and give us a bit more of a sense of, you know, how same gender intimacy as a kind of a specific form of queerness does get inscribed in this moment in Jamaican history.

Right. So it's really interesting to think about. So there is, of course, there have been people who we might consider to be social scientists before, but I guess a more formal tradition of social sciences, we see that begin to establish at the University College of the West Indies, UCWI, which later becomes University of the West Indies. And the first

um, West Indians or, you know, Caribbean people to be trained as anthropologists. Um, they are, for me, what was so interesting as an anthropologist to be like, okay, so where do you, like, how do I fit into this trajectory? Um,

the questions that they were grappling with is, or, you know, I see them grappling with is what would it mean for West Indian to produce not, what it would, what it mean for West Indian people to produce knowledge about themselves in ways that try to move away from colonial narratives, right? And this took place through family studies. And so in an inadvertent way, they were,

they were kind of dealing with similar questions. And so I kind of read through these. And one of the consequences of these family studies is that they kind of were looking at these family formations and kinship systems that were thought to be deviant and explaining it in terms of society and culture. And so in my head, I'm thinking, okay, so they...

We're looking at single mother households and multiple partners.

And kind of that form of sexuality that wasn't accepted at the time and has now become more accepted. Why did other kinds of gender and sexual relations that were not accepted also, like why that among all these other kinds of forms of non-normative gender sexual relations, why didn't they also become, you know, subject to legitimization, right?

So I was like, okay, well, so let's go read over, let's go review all these studies and see where they, they were focused, not just on, you know, the families or people who failed to adhere to these, these ideas of nuclear family, but other forms of sexual. I was looking for a same gender intimacy. And at the first glance, like it doesn't, it's not very long. If you look at social science studies, literature, newspaper coverage, you know, legal documents, you see that the, the,

the primary primary figure that emerges is the elite white foreign male right um you know for example we see we don't see we see willow isaacs who is um a politician who uses the accusation of homosexuality against foreign police officers as part of this anti-colonial critique

And so I was like, okay, well, this can't be it, right? Like there must be. So I was, if reading a little closer, we get same-gen intimacy among poor and working-class Black women in Pucca Mania, which is an Afro-Christian spiritual practice that took root in Jamaica after 1862, which is a period of great revival.

And unlike this white foreign tourist homosexual that is everywhere, literally, in newspapers, in literature, in social science studies, in the courts, Pokomania doesn't... The intimacies among these women are not... We don't see it as often because of the...

the position that Pokamania has in Jamaican history at this time. It is not worthy of serious academic study. It's also something that is, you know, it might be included for kind of

a tokenistic but um you know in you know uh in like in a in a in a uh performance production or um in a novel for but but not in terms of serious study so you know whereas we see um

we see certain kinds of queernesses emerge. I guess the whole purpose at the end of the chapter, what I was realizing is that the way that the archive is structured allows me to see some, some queernesses more than others. It allows me to see, you know,

the way that some bodies are more visibilized than others. And I don't, I, I, I found one instance of middle-class queerness in, you know, Roger Mays' novel, Black Lightning. And I, I think that might be because of a politics of brown respectability that was existing at the time. So how, you know, a politics of brown respectability, how, you know, kind of,

this kind of denigration of anything African, you know, and this kind of critique against white foreignness comes to be inscribed in different kinds of ways, shapes like what, who gets seen as queer and how, you know.

Because I think that question about archival visibility and is actually, because the book is also structured around these parts, archival continuities and narrative ruptures. And maybe we can come to that in a moment. But the next chapter on this line of the archival continuities brings up some similar questions for you, I believe, because in it, you're focusing on the HIV AIDS epidemic in Jamaica. But in this moment, I think, as you say, the arrival of HIV AIDS kind of becomes the moment where same gender desire becomes a more explicit

explicit object of knowledge in Jamaica. So I guess I just wanted to kind of ask a bit more about that and to say, well, who is producing this knowledge? You know, what role did these Jamaican frontline healthcare workers play and how have they kind of shaped what has come to be known as the archive of HIV AIDS in Jamaica?

Right. I mean, I think that's a great question. So the book is, as you mentioned, shaped around two parts, you know, to kind of match the fractal structure is one part is about repetition and one part is around difference. And the part around repetition is around archival continuities. And it's about how the way that the archive is shaped shows us who or shapes how we get to see queerness. Right.

And in this moment, I wanted to... You know, there are different ways to think about...

There are different ways to think about knowledge. And I could have focused on, I wanted to focus this moment on, okay, so Jamaica's in terms of healing and repair, Jamaica's trying to, you know, kind of address HIV AIDS. How do we, you know, repair the damage that HIV AIDS has caused? And one of the ways they did that was through public health.

And so I realized that so many people were producing knowledge around HIV AIDS at this time. And so one of them were, so I kind of interviewed, as I mentioned before, I kind of looked through all these different types of records and found

um, spoke to, spoke to people who had direct contact with people with HIV AIDS or people who did HIV and or AIDS. Um, and I realized that, um, front line workers were the ones who are producing knowledge around. They were the ones who would decide, um, whether or not and how they were going to record information about their patients. Um,

And how they did that was really important. But what was interesting to me was like who was accessible to them and who wasn't. So for example, if you had money, you would fly overseas to get tested, right? The first people to get tested for HIV wasn't through the ministry of health. It was through the ministry of labor for, yeah,

for migrant workers going to the US, right? So already it shows, I mean, not to say that, you know, most likely to be kind of working class and poor black Jamaicans doing that kind of labor in the early 1980s, early 1990s, but it just goes to show that, you know, those who gets caught in the

Who gets caught by the state as it's engaging in public health activities and who gets the stigma of this new disease that is associated with queerness? And for me, it was poor and working class black men. Yeah. So that's kind of that's kind of how I was. I was looking at that chapter.

Because I think in the chapter you get a sense of the ways, similar to what you were talking about before with the chapter about the social science tradition, how race, class, and gender shape which queer subjects become visible or invisible in this archive. And I think that's a kind of a methodological point, which I think is really instructive for a lot of people. But moving on then into the points about rupture.

So in the fourth chapter, I think you kind of take us almost a little backwards in time in a way. And you take us to the, you focus on the Jamaican National Dance Theatre Company. So I was wondering if you could just give us an overview of the history of the NDTC and just give us a sense of why you think it's important for exploring this relationship between queerness and in this moment, cultural decolonization in Jamaica. Yeah.

Right. So at this point, Jamaica, sorry, the National Dance Theater Company of Jamaica was established in 1962, and it was part of a longer national, but also regional move to kind of think about what would it mean to develop a Caribbean movement tradition, not based in

at least not solely based in things like ballet, you know, or modern dance in the US, but what would it mean to develop a dance tradition that was rooted here in the histories of the region? And one of the reasons for that is this kind of longer denigration of Black bodies and how Black bodies would move and how...

So at this moment, 1962 is the year that many English-speaking Caribbean countries who are formerly under the yoke of Great Britain are granted independence. And in many ways, the NETC comes into existence at the same year as Jamaica gives independence, as it's trying to articulate a kind of national culture, right, trying to figure out what that looks like.

And for me, why performance is so interesting is at this moment also the kind of predominant image of gender and sexuality and something that's wrong with gender and sexuality isn't necessarily queerness, it's about overpopulation. This narrative that, you know, I think at one point we see in Jamaica when there was a...

when there was the end of the actual trade in enslaved people, if not the end of enslavement itself, there was a denigration of, you know, enslaved bodies not reproducing enough. And now we skip to a hundred years later and now it's black people are reproducing too much, you know? And so I think that by looking at performance, it gives us a different way to think about gender and sexuality that seem to be a little bit different and

And I focus on two things. One is the renown of the NDTC in those early years and the rumors of queerness among its members. So it's like this secret that's not really a secret. So this moment that Jamaica's coming into independence and kind of trying to figure out what does a movement culture look like

at least on the formal stage, is produced by choir bodies or is, you know, this rumor of quereness trails alongside it. And quereness is also represented on stage. And for me, the quereness is not necessarily, I analyze this piece called, oh, what is it called? Oh, I forget. Trio for three or something. I can't remember. Dance for three or something about three.

And in it, there's this married couple. It's a relationship between a married couple and a woman that the man is seeing. And for me, you know, there's nothing unusual about, at least in Jamaican kind of relationships,

intimate relationships about that, about that kind of formation. But what is unusual is, and it was commented on by performers in Mexico, looking at a review is that the, the difference in the colors of the, of the dancers. And for me, it asks us to think about

One, how do we think about the relationship between women as a side? If we're thinking about kind of family formations and how they're so important for thinking about nationalism, how do we think about the relationship between the women? Not necessarily, the man is kind of to the side. Think about these women and these women of different colors and oftentimes different class statuses or backgrounds.

as forming the basis of national representation of national cultural families, you know? And I think for me, performance is useful thinking about queerness and history because performance is really something, or forms a movement that can't be perfectly replicated and always subject to revision.

And the queerness of dialogue for three, that's the name of the piece, dialogue for three. The queerness of dialogues for three is the differences in color among the performers every time it's performed. And it allows us to think about history otherwise, right? So what would it mean to think about, it's not just like, you know, a white or like light skinned or brown man, right?

and his light skinned or, you know, white wife, and maybe a darker outside woman. But what if the colors of the women change? Like, what if the colors, depending on who the dancer is at any moment, right, those colors could change. And that allows us to think about, I guess, intimacy at this moment of heightened cultural nationalism differently.

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Yeah, because I have a question as well, which I think actually does take us into the fifth chapter as well. But what do you think then is the kind of relationship between the dance, not just a kind of a cultural nationalism, but also a kind of a political nationalism? And I think in the relationship maybe more specifically to the nation states, because I think by the time you get to chapter five,

where you're discussing the gay freedom movement. One of the things, and this, to be honest, was my favorite chapter in the book. You're discussing the nature of the gay freedom movement and its relationship to a kind of post-independence Jamaican nation building that was happening in 1970s that are part of this wave of radical political movements that are moving through the country and through the region in Manley's kind of tenure as prime minister. So I guess if we could just

as well, obviously, give us an overview of the gay freedom movement, but how these things kind of speak to this political nation-building effort that's happening in the 60s and 70s in Jamaica. Right. So I think...

And so this moment, the moment of repair in this moment is repairing politics, right? So, you know, as there's been a recent revisioning of the 70s and, you know, oftentimes there's been a sentiment that, you know, nothing really changed with independence. I mean, things did change in independence, but the sense of something that things could be different was the 70s.

Um, and you know, some people thought that that different was not good and, you know, they fled Jamaica, right? Like manly mashup the country, but there are other people who were like this, you know, we see the rise of, uh, black power moments. We see the rise of feminist movements. We see the rise of, um, labor movement. And, um, for me, um, it was really exciting to, to find out through Kanika Batra's essay, um,

that there was a gay freedom movement in the 70s. And this movement, it began in 1977. And it began out of a very vibrant, like gay informal underground scene.

um and really it didn't it didn't initially start out it wasn't meant to be a serious initiative at all the first kind of newsletter that he published was called toilet paper because they wanted to just throw it away it's like okay well you read it and you throw it away right it's not something that's supposed to continue the first meeting that it held wasn't meant to build it on organization it's like okay so how do we deal with

you know, the conflicts that are happening in this informal club that we have. And then it kind of just built from there. But at the same time, as it did so, you know, it was very caught up in this moment of that some things could be different. And it did articulate itself alongside feminist and Black Power movements,

that I think, you know, I think the feminist movements at that time were, um, really important. I know that they, for example, um, uh, Anna Ford Smith, rights of cistern, um, and they knew of each other for sure. Um, but it's interesting that, you know, the, the only, the only actual, um, I guess, collaborator supporter of, uh,

the Jamaican Gay Freedom Movement at this time was the Revolutionary Marxist League, which was interesting. I didn't get to explore that as much as I would like to, but the Gay Freedom Movement essentially did situate itself in, you know, it's our, we also have to contribute to the nation as much as we, you know, we do see ourselves as Jamaican and we have to contribute to building into what we're

into what we want, even as they're criticizing the major political parties for using, you know, anti-gay slurs.

Yep. Because I think at this moment as well, this is in a way actually coming back to something that you mentioned at the very beginning of the interview. This is where you have a narrative which I think speaks interestingly and maybe, if you want to use this language, speaks back to these ideas about Jamaica's kind of homophobic exceptionalism. You know, Times News article from 2012, was it? You know, the most homophobic place on earth. You know, there's kind of this very frustrating sense among people

realistically, people outside of the Caribbean that homosexuality or queerness in whatever way is somehow kind of at odds with some kind of national belonging. And I think that this chunk of the book or this chapter really speaks to that question really well. And I think it also comes through when you discuss in this chapter the GFM's relationship to the kind of international gay politics and activism that are kind of happening at the time. And I was wondering if you could just touch on that for us as well.

Sure. So, I mean, I think from the very beginning, I mean, I think Jamaica's population is very diasporic. So the newsletter that it, well, first of all, one of the main organizers, Larry Chang, he went to California to go to college. And he would, again, he was politicized by, you know, these feminist black car movements that were taking place.

And he came back. But there are also Jamaicans in New York, in London, in like all of these places. You know, we see relations between the Gay Freedom Movement and Salsa Soul Sisters in New York because they're, you know, Jamaican queer women or lesbians in New York. And they become, you know, the Gay Freedom Movement becomes this

a node in this really interconnected, um, transnational kind of, um, gay liberation movements. Um, so they were contacted by the Scottish homosexual, um, a Scottish homosexual group. They went to the international gay, um,

They were contacted by others for trying to get in contact with other groups in the region. They had a pen pal service that literally, like, the different countries are just, that are writing in to try and talk to Jamaicans or wanting Jamaican pen pals is just a start. Like, people contact from, like, Indonesia, you know, people including the region, but also places like South Africa

Sweden, you know, they really had an international reach, I think, as small as they were. So I think just moving as we're kind of coming towards the end here, I think I wanted to ask, as you do in the epilogue, and this is a lovely coincidence in the book, coming towards the end as well, but with all the discussions that we've kind of had yesterday,

I wanted to ask a question, which is one that you kind of pose in the end of the book, which is what you think the implications of not just the material in the book that you've just discussed, but also this coming back to this question of the method, this idea of queer fractals. What do you think that that does for concepts about futurity or queer futurity? It's just a question that you put in the book. Right. I mean, I think what I...

What I decided to do for the end or the epilogue of the book is to try to find the earliest document around the Caribbean that I could possibly find. And it was Diego Chancla's, it was considered, I guess, the first

you know, historians might put me wrong, but it was considered the first piece of ethnography or like writing about the Caribbean that was then sent back to Spain. And, you know, it's funny because, you know, you always have to read these documents with a grain of salt because, you know, he had specific interests in, is he just trying to promote the colonization of this space? But even then,

I look back and I was like, wow, even from here, this is a moment of queerness where he's describing these indigenous people as in terms of gender and sexual deviance.

And today that, that, that application or, you know, it's still being applied. And so, you know, I think from, it obviously is different, but for me, I think what fractal, queer fractals offers is a way to think about, okay, so the future will be different. It will look a lot like the past. It will be different, but we just don't know what that difference will look like. And it's,

for me, the repair is about holding on to the moments of queerness that are sure to take place. Right? That's kind of what it means to look to the future for me. Well, look into the future. And we've taken up, I think, enough of your time now. But I wanted to ask now our traditional final question on the NBN, which is, what are you working on next? Right. Um,

thank you so much for that question. Um, I, I'm trying to think about the relationship between, um, Asia and the Caribbean as geographies, um, as method. Um, and, um,

I guess, what is an Asian job? What does it mean to think Asia and the Caribbean together? So for me, Asia is central to thinking about the Caribbean. As we know, Columbus was looking for...

Asia, he was looking for India and China. When he stumbled across the Bahamas, we see the legacies of that history in the name West Indies because he thought he had reached India. But after that moment, Asia kind of disappears from how we think about Asia today.

in the Caribbean. And we have seen the centrality of different regions of the world to thinking about Caribbean as we kind of know what Europe means to the Caribbean, right? We know what Africa means to the Caribbean. We're not quite aware

at least I am not as certain, at least I know what Asia means to the Caribbean. I'm also not certain what the Caribbean means to Asia, if anything, right? Does, you know, I think that this question is really important given the increasing presence of China in the Caribbean. And it's a different presence than was in the past, right?

on the previous systems of migration and indentureship. This is a very different relationship. And I think for me, I'm committed to the project of Caribbean studies. And I'm also thinking about

what is the relationship between the project of Caribbean studies and the project of Asian studies, if there is such a thing, right? Because I don't do Asian studies. I'm going to be an interloper in these fields. Is Asia a region in the same way that the Caribbean is a region? How do they exist together?

how they come into being as objects of knowledge, as geographies in terms of race and what does that mean for how we think about each other, about them together, right? I guess it's a global south to global south project.

That sounds absolutely fascinating. And I am looking forward to when it eventually bears fruit. But just wanted to say as well, thank you very much for coming on the show. It's been an absolutely fascinating discussion. I've had the best time speaking to you. And so, yeah, we just wanted to say thank you very much for coming on. Thank you so much, Zach. I really appreciate it.