Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (Perverse Modernities: A Series Edited by Jack Halberstam and Lisa Lowe)

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 In Fractal Repair , Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the islands global reputation for extreme homophobia and antiqueer violence. Chin advances a theory and method of queer fractals to bring together genealogies of queer and Caribbean formation. Fractalsa kind of geometry in which patterns repeat but never exactly in the same waymakes visible shifting accounts of Caribbean queerness in terms of race, gender, and sexual alterity. Drawing on this fractal orientation, Chin assembles and analyzes multigenre archives ranging from mid-twentieth-century social science studies of the Caribbean to Jamaicas National Dance Theatre Company to HIV/AIDS organizations to write reparative histories of queerness. Chins proposal of a fractal politics of repair invests in the horizon of difference that repetition materializes and extends reparations discourses intent on overcoming the past and calculating economic compensation for survivors of violence. Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. Queer Fractals. Making Histories of Repair 1. Queer Jamaica, 1494–1998 Part I. Archival Continuities 2. Knowledge. A “Native” Social Science 3. The Body. Responding to HIV/AIDS Part II. Narrative Ruptures 4. Performance. The National Dance Theatre Company 5. Politics. The Gay Freedom Movement Epilogue. Fractal Futures Notes Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Z