Queer Jamaica: 1494-1998 -- Knowledge : a "native" social science -- The body : responding to HIV/AIDS -- Performance : the National Dance Theatre Company -- Politics : the Gay Freedom Movement
Summary
"Matthew Chin's Fractal Repair interrogates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation into the twentieth century and the present day, critically responding to Jamaica's reputation of homophobia and queer violence. Using historiography as a tool for repair and recovery from historical events, Chin adopts the framework of the queer fractal to bring together theories of queer formation and Caribbean subjectivity. The fractal, a continuously repeating pattern of shapes where each new iteration of the pattern contains minute differences from the previous iteration, thus creates a recursive but shifting account that works well with the history of Caribbean queerness. Drawing on this framework, Chin studies archives ranging from mid-century social sciences and their understanding of the Caribbean to The National Dance Theater Company to HIV/AIDs organizations, to recognize narratives of queerness in Jamaica and the reparative potential of writing its histories"-- Provided by publisher
