Queer Narratives of the Caribbean Diaspora

Exploring Tactics

Z. Pecic

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137379030
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism Theory
• Index: Literature

This book examines the concept of queer theory and combines it with the field of diaspora studies. By looking at the queer diasporic narratives in and from the Caribbean, it conducts an inquiry into the workings and underpinnings of both fields.

1

Queer Tactical Diaspora and the Caribbean Space

Queer Tactics

Fifteen years after the first emergence of queer theory in academia, David L. Eng, Judith Halberstam and Jose Esteban Muños ask: ‘what’s queer about queer studies now?’ (2005, 1).¹ Attempting to reassess ‘the political utility of queer’, they call for a ‘renewed queer studies ever vigilant to the fact that sexuality is intersectional … calibrated to a firm understanding of queer as a political metaphor without a fixed referent’. Their urge to chart a new political ground for queer studies is suggestive of the necessity and inevitability of queer studies to open up its boundaries and broaden the field beyond the borders of Euro-America.

Closely related to the issues of intersectionality within queer theory (and subsequently diaspora studies) is the much longer history of immigration scholarship and its focus on how race, class and gender affect numerous migration processes. This history, however, has virtually ignored the connections between heteronormativity, sexuality and migration. Immigration scholarship, with its focus on various social regulations, especially those related to the issues of ‘race’, class and ethnicity, overlooks Foucault’s characterisation of sexuality as a ‘dense transfer point for relations of power’, a point which becomes a focus of social regulation and biopower (1990, 103). Moreover the conflation of sexuality with gender only reinforces the normativity of opposite object choice. The pitfalls of such gender-centred analyses are the unfortunate reinscriptions of heteronormativity, affirming Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s caveat that ‘the question of gender and the question of sexuality, inextricable from one another though they are in that each can be expressed only in terms of the other, are nonetheless not the same question’ (30). Eithne Luibhéid reminds us that

sexuality is an axis of power that structures all aspects of international migration. It is centrally implicated in—but not reducible to—the gender, racial, class, cultural, and legal inequalities that immigrants continually negotiate. … Yet in most immigration scholarship, sexuality and heteronormativity remain ignored, trivialized, derided, or conflated with gender. (232)

On the one hand, Luibhéid calls for an expansion of the areas of research in migration studies to address heteronormativity and the normalising regimes in aspects of migration and, on the other, for focusing studies of sexuality on ‘international immigration’s centrality to the making of “modern” gay, lesbian, and queer identities, communities, cultures, and politics’ (233).

Theorising the intersections between diaspora studies and queer studies involves looking at sexuality as a mobile tactic of deterritorialising the relationship between diaspora and queer. By means of tactical deterritorialisation, we are able to challenge the restrictive binary of the local/global identity. The movement between geographical territories is hereby presented as a theoretically significant factor in the construction and discussion of sexuality. Moreover, translocation enters the picture as an element in the transformation of sexualities that are on the move—indeed, the local and global effects of various diasporas force us to turn our attention towards re-inventions and re-negotiations of sexualities in new places and new territories. Diaspora forces us to acknowledge that ‘sexuality is not only not essence, not timeless, it is also not fixed in place; sexuality is on the move’ (Patton and Sánchez-Eppler 2000, 2, my emphasis). Therefore, in this book I delve deeper into the relationship between sexuality and ‘being on the move’ and ask what happens and what is at stake in the tactical space between diaspora and queer. These questions are significant for not only the interrogation of multiple discourses of queer movement and their ability to unsettle the balance between home and away—by metamorphosing the materiality of place we are able to destabilise the static place and ultimately the developmental model of queer identity. Introducing a tactical space enables us to re-create and re-member place differently, stripping off the certainty of strategy’s grasp on place. But before such deterritorialisation can come into effect, we need to work on the intersections between queer studies and diaspora studies, or what is becoming known as queer diaspora. My emphasis on tacticality adds to queer diaspora the vital notions of movement between not only geographical locations but also theoretical paradigms (from queer and diaspora theory to postcolonial studies to psychoanalysis to poststructuralism). This, along with analyses of fictional queer narratives, fuses the aforementioned theoretical paradigms, deterritorialising the relationship between diaspora and queer.

The body of work that focuses on queer diaspora is vast and growing. Sánchez-Eppler and Patton’s collection Queer Diasporas (2000) is a significant volume that emphasises queer sexuality in a transnational context, using movement to fuse these distinct concepts in unpredicted ways. This synthesis, according to the editors, ‘produces a line of inquiry as intent on deconstructing universalizing ideas about sexuality as it is insistent on catching the lilt of each local articulation of desire’ (2). Featuring chapters from prominent scholars from various fields in the humanities, the collection ranges from the discussions of gender production in Japanese kitchens to an interview with a young gay Arab, living in Israel, who engages in sexual encounters with Israeli men. The volume charts a new territory for the study of queerness and diaspora, and according to the editors, ‘reveals an extraordinarily complex picture of the frictional relation between geopolitics and embodied desires’ (3). In their 2002 edited essay collection entitled Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé and Martin F. Manalansan argue that the

position occupied by queer sexualities and cultures in our globalized world as a mediating figure between the nation and diaspora, home and the state, the local and the global … has not only been a site of dispossession, it has also been a creative site for queer agency and empowerment. (2)

In line with my idea of the queer tactical diaspora, the editors add that this position ‘has also provided diasporic queers … the opportunity to connect with other queers and sexuality and gender activists “at home” in order to interrogate the limits both of nationalist discourses and of modern Euro-American lesbian and gay narratives of identity’ (2). Moreover, Eng et al.’s special issue of Social Text besides re-examining the utility of queer studies, investigates how queer diasporas have ‘become a concerted site for the interrogation of the nation-state, citizenship, imperialism, and empire’ (7). According to Eng, queer diaspora ‘investigates what might be gained politically by reconceptualizing diaspora not in conventional terms of ethnic dispersion, filiation, and biological traceability, but rather in terms of queerness, affiliation, and social contingency’ (2003, 4). As a result, queer diaspora ‘emerges as a concept providing new methods of contesting traditional family and kinship structures—of reorganizing national and transnational communities based not on origin, filiation, and genetics but on destination, affiliation, and the assumption of a common set of social practices or political commitments’ (2003, 4). What these volumes show is that when combined, queer and diaspora, although they denote highly contested terrain, exhibit the ability to contest the imperialist notions of sexual, racial and national immigrations. Queer diaspora does not imply a refusal of homeland—both queer and diaspora employ discourses and narratives of home as a site of familiarity. It does, however, reverse the traditional notion of home as origin into home as destination. Indeed, both queer and diaspora compel us to rethink the question of home and belonging, not only in terms of migration as homecoming but also in regard to queering home not as a site of trauma but as a site of a queer possibility: ‘suspended between an “in” and “out” of the closet—between origin and destination, and between private and public space—queer entitlements to home and a nation-state remain doubtful’ (Eng 2007, 208). Thinking about transnational queer culture diasporically offers a renewed insight into the multiple tactical spaces located within the spatio-temporal spaces of queer belonging. Caught between the restraining local and the ever-expanding global, this tactical space affords a promising ability of reconfiguration and recomposition of the local, cultural and national differences and collectivities within the queer diaspora space.²

Framing queer sexuality diasporically is not an uncomplicated process. The apparent dangers within queer diaspora, despite its efforts to expand queer theory and expand its borders beyond Euro-Americanism, are the reconstitution of neo-colonialist relations between ‘the west and the rest’ (Gopinath 1996, 265). Conjectures about the passivity of the non-Euro-American queer risk the assumptions of framing a non-Western encounter with queer culture and politics as purely an imitation and an unmodified display of the influence of Euro-American discourses of gay/lesbian and queer cultures. The self-centricity of European and North American definition of what constitutes queer sexuality and culture is one of the apparent dangers of embracing queer diaspora as a trope of racial, sexual, cultural and economic equality between all queer subjects. The concealment of inequality and power across geographical borders runs the risk of reinstating cultural and colonial dominance on the part of ‘the West’. Viewing the constituency of queer groupings in, for instance, the United States and the Philippines as homogenous, exposes the long historical and cultural dominance of the West over the other, reinstating the differences between ‘us’ and ‘them’ across the diasporic imagination. In response, I interrogate the power structures that operate within the ‘community’ and, at the same time, unearth the tendencies to obscure the racial, ethnic, class and gender-based power relations within and between the diasporised communities. A critical interrogation into queer diaspora allows an insight into the travelling bodies and their freedom and access to movement as well as the opposing construction of differentiation and homogenisation in the production of the queer signifier.

‘Whose queerness?’, Gopinath asks in her caveat that same-sex eroticism exists and signifies differently in different diasporic contexts (1996, 263). Certainly, the export of Western sexual and cultural paradigms to the non-West attests to the power of global structures of imperialism and neo-colonialism in shaping the ways queer subjects negotiate their sexual identity across various diasporas. Queer diaspora challenges the notion that queerness and queer visibility is solely a Western import, an alien and unknown concept in other parts of the world. In the world of transnationalism and the constant border crossings, ideologies and images of ‘gay’ identity and practices are becoming ever-more problematic. The globalisation of gay and lesbian ‘liberation’, by privileging Western definition of same-sex sexual practices, runs the risk of marginalising non-Western sexual practices as ‘pre-modern’ or somehow unliberated. Coding the practices that do not conform to the Western developmental notions of ‘coming out’ as homophobic or non-progressive exposes the neocolonising assumptions of sexuality on the part of the queer Western subjects, reinforcing hierarchical relations between the urban centre and the rural periphery. Particularly within the discourses of what constitutes ‘gay’ identity, we find the homonormativity of certain strands of Euro-American queer studies that privilege White male subjectivity whilst relegating the non-White racialised subject to the periphery of modern sexuality. The definition of sexuality and society in terms of temporality, where the unliberated (closeted) pre-gay subject becomes aware of his/her homosexuality and works his/her way to the recognition and liberation (or outing) of his/her homosexual desire, is an area where queer diaspora needs to focus its attention and make diaspora more supple in relation to questions of race, migration and colonialism.

In Culture and Imperialism (1993), Edward Said points out that in the late twentieth century the United States has become a paramount imperial power, with the Western fiction and mass media as the primary weapons for conquest and domination of other cultures. Indeed, it appears that this pre-eminence has influenced the dissemination of queer theory as well. The marking of the United States by a colonising gay identity erases the global cultural differences and imperial power relations. Moreover, the paternalistic activist astuteness of lesbian and gay activists that judge the level of ‘progress’ of another country in terms of the ‘universal’ trajectory of the Stonewall Riots, the coming out narrative and identity politics and inherent civil rights, unfortunately situates a putatively universal and ahistorical transcendent gay identity. Similarly, some literary projects attempt to locate a lesbian or gay ‘past’ into a linear and unified gay tradition, imposing a specifically Western and imperialist teleology of sexuality and liberation onto historically, culturally and traditionally diverse subjects, reinforcing the centeredness of the Euro-American academia. Indeed, the teleological, Western-centred developmental narrative of coming out and recognising one’s homosexuality places other forms of non-gay identity at the fringes of ‘civilised’ sexuality. The Euro-Americanness of queer theory, with its focus on the White bourgeois assumptions and the transnational lesbian and gay movement, needs to incorporate a critique of its own universalising categories if it is not to replicate the neo-colonising assumptions in relation to non-Western sexual practices. Thus queer theory needs the diasporising and diasporic framework in order to decentre the dominant Euro-American paradigms, a framework that will work in contradistinction to the globalisation and internationalisation of ‘gay’ identity, specifically in relation to the narrative of development and progress that places non-Western sexual practices as non-modern. Western assumptions about terms like gay, lesbian, the closet and homophobia need to be interrogated, whilst the view that these are naturally given concepts requires that we place them within the context of their specific national histories. Sexual practices that are not organised around visibility are assumed to be closeted or repressed whilst the lack of publicly identified gay people implies that the society in question is predominantly homophobic and hostile towards homosexuality.

Diasporising queerness, however, is not a one-way transmission of queer styles and cultures. The consumption of queerness on the part of non-Western queer subjects is not solely a meagre mimicry, a periodic repetition incapable of displacing conventions. On the contrary, queer diasporic reading practices can adapt and translate queer styles and cultures into productive and creative acts that have the power to displace imperialistic conventions and rework the multiple (queer) pleasures and desires that stem from non-Western territories. Popularising the idea of ‘global flows’, Arjun Appadurai argues that ‘the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order, which cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models (even those which might account for multiple centers and peripheries)’ (31). One of the key elements of Appadurai’s argument is that these flows are disjunctive and chaotic, allowing for a renewed understanding of geography. The multiplicity of flows, Appadurai argues, recreates and transforms geographical spaces, deconstructing simple models of centre-periphery. Queer diaspora, in a similar vein, reworks the emptying out of political and sexual agency of non-Western subjectivities and produces a site of pleasure consigned to the geographical terrains outside Europe and the United States. Pleasure, by means of queer diasporic readings, is reclaimed and reinvented by the very subjects caught under the logic of the Western colonial and imperial imagination. Certainly, the flow of commodities and identities is not one-way (from the West to the rest)—it is a multiple exchange that reinvents and re-contests queerness and ethnicity. A critical queer diaspora bends and unties the generalised notions of queer subjects, producing and reproducing new geographies of desire, based not on a stable one-way transfer of ideas and identifications but on multiple, fertile, de- and reterritorialised sites of exchange. It opens up a possibility for constructing a creative dialogue between existing power structures in order to deconstruct those very constructs and create new transnational spaces of belonging to consider the multiple ways in which individuals move between and within those spaces. The manifold ways by which desire and attachment come about within these sites of flow and mobility, the manner in which diasporic identities are contested and renewed, are one of the vital tactics of queer diaspora.

The transformations of place and the various identifications that occur in the process force us to interrogate the various meanings of the queer diasporic body within the discourse of colonialism, race, gender and sexuality. This, I suggest, enables us to re-member histories of racist and colonial violence that continue to resonate in the present. Queer diasporic re-membering queers the otherwise traditionally backward-looking diasporic discourse, or what Stuart Hall calls the ‘overwhelming nostalgia for lost origins, for “times past” and activates a different past, one fraught with memories of uprooting, displacement and exile’ (‘Cultural Identity and Diaspora’, 245). The queer bodily desire points towards dislocation via the queer body in order to bring past memories into the present and modify them as well as transform the very spaces created in the diasporic invocations of the imaginary homeland. The need for a queer diasporic reading is particularly apt when seen in conjunction with diaspora’s gaze towards ‘lost (heterosexual) origins’ and its expression of the conventional diasporic and national imaginaries that naturalise the relationship between nationalism and heterosexuality. Re-membering transforms—indeed translates—the national discourses of ‘originality’ and ‘purity’ into queer versions of the primary texts, inventing and re-conceiving notions of ‘home’ and home-land. Thus, the concept of queer diaspora and queer diasporic reading destabilises the tranquillity and immobility of place, blasphemising spaces of purity, tradition and authenticity of home. For the queer diasporic racialised body, home, a site fraught with oppressing structures of community space, becomes a tactical space ready to be reworked from within. Dislodging the heterosexual discourse of the nation-state is one of the tactical means of creating diasporic spaces within the oppressing structures, for it generates possibilities and desires within a queer subjectivity. Queer diaspora lays claims to the nation and home by reinscribing the heterosexual home as a site of homoeroticism not alien to the workings of a community. The queer diasporic imagery, by re-signifying what it means to be ‘home’, reinstates queer subjectivity as a vital part of the makings of a national community, whilst simultaneously recollecting the queer subjectivity within the historically shared national past and memory. This conceptual space, which I call tactical diaspora, caught between ‘here’ and ‘there’, levels a powerful critique of the discourses of tradition and purity within national and diasporic ideologies.

Queer diaspora blasphemises the purity of place. By treating place this way I employ Michel de Certeau’s distinctions between strategy and tactics as a theoretical tool for de- and reterritorialising belonging and location. Strategies, according to Certeau, ‘pin their hopes on the resistance that the establishment of a place offers to the erosion of time’, whilst tactics ‘[rely] on a clever utilization of time, of the opportunities it presents and also of the play that it introduces into the foundations of power’ (1984, 38–39, emphasis in original). Strategy relies on the creation and assertion of a particular identity in the given space; tactics, on the other hand, do not rely on the ‘proper’ place but suggest a temporary and fragmentary projection over a terrain ‘without taking it over in its entirety, without being able to keep it at a distance’ (xix). Strategic rationalisation, according to Certeau, ‘seeks first of all to distinguish its “own” place, that is, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Queer Tactical Diaspora and the Caribbean Space
• 2. Shani Mootoo’s Diasporas
• 3. The Movements of Dionne Brand
• 4. Queering the Bildungsroman
• 5. Reshaping the Past in Lawrence Scott’s Aelred’s Sin
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index