Between here and “not here”: Queer desires and postcolonial longings in the writings of Dionne Brand and José Esteban Muñoz

ABSTRACT

This article examines the concepts of “not here” in Dionne Brand’s work and “not yet here” in José Esteban Muñoz’s work. These concepts are linked with queer desires, but also postcolonial longings and visions for other political and social possibilities. Both Brand’s and Muñoz’s writings rephrase and rearticulate various Third World social revolutions as part of their examination of queer possibilities, practices and narratives. Their work reinscribes and re-imagines histories and practices of marronage which have been central to Caribbean anticolonial thought, politics and narrative. A reading of Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here directly considers and examines its investments in marronage for constructing queer possibilities and futures. “Not here” references the historical and imaginative practices of Maroon flight that enables a rethinking of colonial histories and their interrelated structuring epistemologies of race, gender, sexuality and territoriality, and which enacts a move towards (re-)imagining queer possibilities and futures.

KEYWORDS:

• Queerness
• marronage
• flight
• Caribbean revolutions
• José Esteban Muñoz
• Dionne Brand

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In the context of the social revolutions referenced here, the idea and concept of the “Third World” was invested with naming political possibilities beyond the East-West aligned politics of the Cold War. In my use of the concept here I want to recall this ideological and political understanding of the concept rather than necessarily invoking notions of the Third World in relation to narratives of economic development.

2. The historiography of the Cuban revolution which brought Fidel Castro to power and created a new communist state is entangled with independence struggles and political dreams, including military struggle in Algeria and various independence and liberation struggles, across the colonized world. The Grenadian Revolution, which started in 1979 and culminated with the 1983 US invasion, has also served as a connecting point for Third World anti-US-imperialist struggle in the context of the Cold War.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ronald Cummings

Ronald Cummings is assistant professor of postcolonial studies at Brock University. His work focuses on queer Caribbean writing and critical Maroon studies. His essays have appeared in Small Axe, Journal of West Indian Literature and Transforming Anthropology.