“Leave to quit boundaries”: Danger, precarity, and queer diasporas in the South Asian Caribbean

ABSTRACT

Caribbean writer A.R.F. Webber’s 1917 Those That Be in Bondage is the first novel of the South Asian Caribbean. In it, he locates migration and sexuality within larger colonial systems spanning economics, race, class, and gender norms. Shani Mootoo’s 2008 novel, Valmiki’s Daughter, shows how queer lives are shaped in the Caribbean, and how they are often on the move, intersecting with the objects and conditions of migration. From big oil in Trinidad and its local and global displacements, to colonial heteronormativity and the dislocation of desires in the present, these narratives compel us to critically evaluate how racialized genders and sexualities shape liminal diasporas in the Caribbean. This article assesses contemporary and historical diasporas, focusing on bodies dislocated by racialized heteropatriarchy in colonial and postcolonial contexts via the lens of anti-colonial queer phenomenology.

KEYWORDS:

• Shani Mootoo
• A.R.F. Webber
• queer diasporas
• phenomenology
• postcolonial studies
• immigration

Acknowledgments

The initial research for this project was generously funded by the Institute for Undergraduate Research at Jackson State University. The author would like to thank the Institute and its director, Edna Caston, and also his undergraduate research assistants: Shameelah Abdullah, Natasha Arrington, Benjamin Knott, and Keiann Williams.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For more on conscription as a theoretical lens through which to assess migration from imperialism to neoliberal globalization, see Foster (2019).

2. Though I do not adequately cover the novel here, and although there seems to be a paucity of scholarship on the novel to this date, I recommend Cudjoe’s (1988) and Klein’s (2018) substantial work on the text.

3. “Being-in-the-world” is Heidegger’s (1962) term used to theorize what all humans have/are ontologically, marking a departure from Cartesian metaphysics. I appropriate this term as well as the philosophical vocabulary of Heidegger, Sartre, and the Négritude poets’ ontological phenomenology.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Christopher Ian Foster

Christopher Ian Foster is the author of Conscripts of Migration: Neoliberal Globalization, Nationalism, and the Literature of New African Diasporas (2019). He served as an assistant professor of English and Africana Studies at Jackson State University and James Madison University. He received a PhD in English from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2015 and has published widely in postcolonial and diaspora studies on the literature of global migration. He is currently a faculty member in the International Studies Program at Colorado State University.