Creolized Sexualities

Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean

Alison Donnell

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781978818118, 9781978818125
• eBook ISBN: 9781978818132
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Frauenrechtlerische Literaturkritik

Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean draws attention to a wide, and surprising, range of writings that craft inclusive and pluralizing representations of sexual possibilities within the Caribbean imagination. Reading across an eclectic range of writings from V.S. Naipaul to Marlon James, Shani Mootoo to Junot Diaz, Andrew Salkey to Thomas Glave, Curdella Forbes to Colin Robinson, this bold work of literary criticism brings into view fictional worlds where Caribbeanness and queerness correspond and reconcile. Through inspired close readings Donnell gathers evidence and argument for the Caribbean as an exemplary creolized ecology of fluid possibilities that can illuminate the prospect of a non-heteronormalizing future. Indeed, Creolized Sexualities hows how writers have long rendered sexual plasticity, indeterminacy, and pluralism as an integral part of Caribbeanness and as one of the most compelling if unacknowledged ways of resisting the disciplining regimes of colonial and neocolonial power.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Undoing Heteronormativity and the Erotics of Creolization
• 1. The Queer Creolized Caribbean
• 2. Creolizing Heterosexuality: Curdella Forbes’s “A Permanent Freedom” and Shani Mootoo’s Valmiki’s Daughter
• 3. Caribbean Freedoms and Queering Homonormativity: Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement
• 4. Queering Caribbean Homophobia: Non-heteronormative Hypermasculinity in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
• 5. Imagining Impossible Possibilities: Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab and Selected Writings by Thomas Glave
• Conclusion
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author
• Series List