There is an obvious compatibility between queer theory and speculative fiction, with the latter’s attention to other realities and its exploration of queer subjectivities. The suitability of the speculative genre to articulate worlds not usually acknowledged as “normal” is also matched by its ability to revise conceptions of gender and sexual identity. Yet the genre of science fiction, in particular, or speculative fiction, in general, is not as frequently engaged by queer studies as one would imagine.¹ Jamaican writer Marlon James, in his magic realist novel John Crow’s Devil (2005), has demonstrated the ability of speculative fiction to expose queerness in “normative” worlds and altered states of consciousness in both characters and readers. The interrogation of ideas of normativity has become even more urgent in contemporary Jamaica, since queer sexualities are routinely marked via tropes of madness, exceptionalism, and violence—disciplinary strategies used to police the presumed borders of “normalcy.” As Wendy Knepper has pointed out, even as the punitive manoeuvers of “sexual violence and homophobia” continue to be deployed in the Caribbean, the “richly experimental and dissident approach” of speculative fiction helps to contest identity structures of normativity and exclusion (140).²

Though Knepper (like other critics, including myself in an earlier draft of this chapter) tends to hold the paradigm of normalcy in place to show the transgressive potential of queer conceptualizing, my current reading of James engages with the work of queer theorists such as Cathy Cohen, Lisa Duggan, and Jack Halberstam to think through what queer conceptualization would look like without normalcy as its alter ego.³ In this exploration, I argue that the genre of speculative fiction, as deployed in John Crow’s Devil, maps altered states of metaphysical conception in order to disturb the notions of normalcy and naturalness that help to legitimize sexual subjectivities.⁴ As a fiction of fluid sexual-subjectivities and expansive imaginings that exposes the world as already unorthodox, James’s magic realist narrative mobilizes the sexual body as a site of queer desire, hyper-violence and as a source of altered states of consciousness in conceptions of gender, sexuality, and normality.

This chapter builds on the work of earlier readings of John Crow’s Devil, by Sheri-Marie Harrison in her book chapter “Beyond Inclusion, beyond Nation: Queering Twenty First-Century Caribbean Literature” and Renée Mair in her master’s thesis on “sacred violence,” to propose that one way of reading James’s novel is as a book about altered states of consciousness and “queer phenomenology” (Ahmed 4). Sheri-Marie Harrison recognizes the value of queer theory to her analysis, particularly as a way of “traversing and creatively transforming conceptual boundaries” (Harper et al. qtd. in Harrison 146). This queer reading of the novel allows her to see the monstrosity of institutions of traditional order (the family—incest/paedophilia; the church—corrective violence; the nation—exclusion and repression), the “madness” of “a community’s reliance on particular kinds of institutional authority,” and “the frightening consequences nonadherence carries” (143). To take this excellent reading further, I think it is important to consider the ways in which queer theory’s “definitional indeterminacy” and “heteronormative contingencies” enforce a different form of epistemology, thus altering our states of consciousness (Harrison, Jamaica’s Difficult Subjects 144). Through the lens of “queer phenomenology,” I argue that religious institutions can be seen as a source of sexual trauma and a site for normalizing both abusive and queer sexualities.

Queer theory and the magic realist genre are not given priority in Mair’s reading. In her focus on genre, she sees the novel as “fusing the gothic, Jamaican folk forms and the Christ narrative” (6). When she invokes magic realism, she discusses it as primarily used to “heighten the conflict explored” (7). In privileging the gothic genre and reading through the lens of traditional religion, she inadvertently reinforces the binary polarities between witchcraft and Christianity and reads the novel as one about judgement. My own reading privileges the magic realist genre deployed to show how the novel advances a different interpretive strategy that allows us to see the normative/non-normative binary as limiting.

In this chapter, the term speculative fiction is used as in Nalo Hopkinson’s introduction to Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction, which suggests that “speculative” functions much like an umbrella term to cover a variety of fabulist subgenres. Inviting writers to contribute to her anthology, she specifies, inter alia, that “speculative elements such as magic realism, fantasy, folklore, fable, horror, or science fiction must be an integral part of the story” (xii). Attending to the framing of these narratives as “speculative fiction” is not just meant for classification purposes, but also refers to the category’s conceptual value. Hopkinson explains that the speculative or fantastical elements of a story must be “real”:

Duppies and jumbies must exist outside the imaginations of the characters; any scientific extrapolation should seem convincingly based in the possible. It’s an approach designed to ease or force the suspension of disbelief, to block flight back into the familiar world, to shake up the reader into thinking in new tracks. (xii, italics added)

Though the distinction between the real and the imaginative in this requirement might appear problematic,⁵ her insistence that the fantastic must be located in the real helps us to see that, rather than presenting “alternative worlds” to the real world, speculative fiction, as she deploys it, exposes the restrictions of normalcy that disavow the magical in the real, even as it shows the ways in which the “real world” is itself a fictional construct.

From the perspective of writers associated with magic realism, otherworldliness already inhabits the real. According to Alejo Carpentier, “the marvelous begins to be unmistakably marvelous when it arises from a privileged revelation of reality” (86, italics added). In Carpentier’s view, one has to have a certain perceptual lens to recognize the marvellous in the real, a reality “perceived with particular intensity” (86). As Pauline Melville reminds us, “The term magic realism comes from the original Spanish phrase lo real maravilloso, the correct translation of which is ‘the marvels of reality’” (136, italics in original). If magical realism, by definition, exposes the “manifestations of an otherwise invisible reality” (Delbaere-Garant 250), then it includes what some have deemed “alternative” sexual expression and desire as already within the boundaries of everyday experience. While the logic and strategic politics of queer advocacy and postcolonial counter-discourse rightly privilege the idea of alterity, making more “bodies matter,” it is time to revisit the concept of “the alternative” in Caribbean cultural criticism and queer theory that continues to reinforce the idea of “the normative” in such political manoeuvers.⁶ Considering the genre of speculative fiction confronts the conceptual limit of “alternative worlds” vis-à-vis “altered states.” What might be a crucial conceptual stake to foreground is not so much the (ontological or) state of the world in speculative fiction, but the (epistemological or) state of our consciousness or worldview as advanced by the speculative genre. In this way, an altered state of consciousness might facilitate our ability to see the variety in human subjectivities, beyond and within “normative” production of relationships.

In Caribbean cultural criticism, the idea of normative states of consciousness is conceptually built within the walls and boundary lines of acceptability, visibility, recognition, respectability, and power.⁷ In this regard, queer subjectivities become invisible, unrecognized; they are part of what Sheri-Marie Harrison calls “difficult subjects” of the Jamaican nation (Jamaica’s Difficult Subjects 144). Marlon James illustrates this view in John Crow’s Devil when he shows that queer desire is a kind of “repressed social content,” as Jennifer Rahim has argued in her discussion of queer desire in Caribbean culture (123). From this perspective, it is not so much that queer desire is not part of our everyday existence and within our horizons of sexual expression, but that we “repress” (Rahim), “disavow” (Smith), or, as I am arguing, mark such desires as excessive, exceptional, marvellous, mad, and outside of the norm. In James’s novel, Lucinda’s characterization of her engagement in masturbation (a kind of auto-eroticism) demonstrates the point: “But here was something that seemed monstrous. Something so beyond herself. More than once she had come close to letting her fingers have their way again; all ten digits finding points of pleasure in the fleshy folds of her dark vagina” (126, italics added). The representational flagging (and rhetorical flogging) of black and queer subjectivities as “Other” and associated with madness/mental disease is historically dated, according to Sander L. Gilman in Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness. From this study, Gilman concludes that “the black [subject], both male and female, becomes by the eighteenth century an icon for deviant sexuality,” and psychological and moral degeneracy (81). Consequently, “masturbation, homosexuality, promiscuity…, prostitution … are all degenerate forms of adult sexual experience, since they are ascribed to the Other” (213). As Conrad James and I have argued, the hyperbolic marking of queer sexuality as a way of “Othering” is also one of the means by which heteronormativity masks its own accommodation of queer desire (Bucknor and James 1–7).

The language of excess and exceptionalism that emerges from strategies of Othering and that marks the marvellous in speculative fiction is also associated with the trope of madness in James’s novel and, more broadly, in Caribbean literature, as Kelly Baker Josephs outlines in Disturbers of the Peace. Yet bringing together concepts of madness, the marvellous in speculative fiction, and strategies of Othering exposes the borderlines of normativity as flexible and fluid. Both Knepper and Josephs, respectively discussing the marvellous in the speculative genre and madness in Caribbean literature, suggest that these concepts help to point out the ways in which the rules of normativity are less rigid than dominant culture would readily admit. For Knepper, Nalo Hopkinson’s playfulness with the speculative genre exposes the redundancy of these normative rules: Hopkinson’s “ludic approach to gender corresponds to Kate Bornstein’s notion of gender play as a way of changing constructs and rewriting the rules that structure the performance of gender” (144). Knepper’s point is reinforced in Josephs’s discussion of madness, a trope that helps to “point out the tenuousness of social consent and the meaninglessness of adhering to rules when one is the colonial” (43). As Sheri-Marie Harrison argues in her review of Josephs’s book, “adhering to the rules is more often than not a futile and ultimately maddening endeavor, but one that is fatalistically accepted as part and parcel of colonial reality” (“Fighting Madness” 5). Therefore, “[w]hile the potential leaders of [Sylvia Wynter’s] The Hills of Hebron—Moses, Obadiah, and Kate—are marked as mad, the novel situates this insanity as a necessary, and necessarily temporary, stage in the development of successful visionaries” (Josephs 47, qtd. in Harrison, “Fighting Madness” 5). This link between “madness” and seeing differently, by way of Josephs’s association of madness with “visionaries,” is useful in turning attention to the ways in which speculative fiction is less concerned with “alternative worlds” than with altered states of consciousness.

If Kelly Baker Josephs links madness to what I am calling altered states of consciousness via visionaries, critical work on the fantastic in Caribbean cultural expression and magic realism in African literature, for example, has pointed to the value of an expansive imagination that approximates what Sara Ahmed calls “queer phenomenology” (2). It is interesting to note that in the character Lucinda, James brings together madness, the spiritual/occult world, and queer desire. This turn to the mythological, magical, or spiritual epistemological frames, then, reinforces the importance of altered states of consciousness in exposing the expansive possibilities in human sexuality. Kei Miller, in the essay “Maybe Bellywoman Was on ‘di Tape,’” argues that queerness has always been a part of the Jamaican psyche and folk mythology through our much-celebrated cultural rituals (Kumina and Jonkanoo) or folk figures (River Mumma and Anansi).⁸ Miller sees queerness as part of a mythological conception (100) and as a way of viewing the world, not from a “straight and narrow” perspective, but from an “elastic imagination” (104). So, in his queer conception, “[t]o see a mythical being in Jamaica requires creativity, odd rituals, a stretching of the neck if not of the mind” (104). As I have argued elsewhere, the creative vision of Kei Miller is a “slant-eye poetics,” which describes a way of looking from the corners of his eyes, expanding into a peripheral vision that might account for things unseen when one looks straight ahead (Bucknor, “Looking from the Corners of His Eyes” 138). Similarly, Brenda Cooper in Magical Realism in West African Fiction describes the way in which the genre of magic realism provides a space of conceptualization that is akin to something like a “third eye” (1). For her, “magical realism … contests polarities such as history versus magic”; thus, “[c]apturing such boundaries between spaces is to exist in a third space, in the fertile interstices between these extremes of time or space” (1). This “third eye” perspective allows one to see a wider continuum between and beyond binary positions that, I am arguing, could include multiple modes of sexual expression—a liminal space of queer desire—so that the normative boundary of sexual desire is made a blurry horizon of emerging possibilities. Both the Jamaican and the wider postcolonial conceptions of altered states of consciousness are interpretive strategies aligned with “queer phenomenology.” For Ahmed, queer phenomenology “might rather enjoy [the] failure to be proper” (2) and would redirect “our attention toward … those that deviate or are deviant” (3). In short, “By bringing what is ‘behind’ to the front, we might queer phenomenology by creating a new angle, in part by reading for the angle … [or offering] a different ‘slant’” (4). Though I am uncomfortable with the language of deviance that reinforces the ideas of normalcy as the standard, I think the emphasis on a “slant-eye” vision in Ahmed’s concept of queer phenomenology helps to direct attention to altered states of consciousness in magic realism, re-conceptualizing what is deemed proper.⁹

Speculative fiction aler...