This book examines the concept of queer theory and combines it with the field of diaspora studies. By looking at the queer diasporic narratives in and from the Caribbean, it conducts an inquiry into the workings and underpinnings of both fields.

Employing rootedness as a way of understanding identity has increasingly been subjected to acerbic political and theoretical critiques. Politically, roots narratives have been criticized for attempting to police identity through a politics of purity—excluding anyone who doesn’t share the same narrative. Theoretically, a critique of essentialism has led to a suspicion against essence and origins regardless of their political implications. The central argument of Queer Roots for the Diaspora is that, in spite of these debates, ultimately the desire for roots contains the “roots” of its own deconstruction. The book considers alternative root narratives that acknowledge the impossibility of returning to origins with any certainty; welcome sexual diversity; acknowledge their own fictionality; reveal that even a single collective identity can be rooted in multiple ways; and create family trees haunted by the queer others patrilineal genealogy seems to marginalize. The roots narratives explored in this book simultaneously assert and question rooted identities within a number of diasporas—African, Jewish, and Armenian. By looking at these together, one can discern between the local specificities of any single diaspora and the commonalities inherent in diaspora as a global phenomenon. This comparatist, interdisciplinary study will interest scholars in a diversity of fields, including diaspora studies, postcolonial studies, LGBTQ studies, French and Francophone studies, American studies, comparative literature, and literary theory.

In Queer Tidalectics, Emilio Amideo investigates how Anglophone writers James Baldwin, Jackie Kay, Thomas Glave, and Shani Mootoo employ the trope of fluidity to articulate a Black queer diasporic aesthetics. Water recurs as a figurative and material site to express the Black queer experience within the diaspora, a means to explore malleability and overflowing sexual, gender, and racial boundaries. Amideo triangulates language, the aquatic, and affect to delineate a Black queer aesthetics, one that uses an idiom of fluidity, slipperiness, and opacity to undermine and circumvent gender normativity and the racialized heteropatriarchy embedded in English. The result is an outline of an ever-expanding affective archive of experiential knowledge. Amideo engages and extends the work of Black queer studies, Oceanic studies, ecocriticism, phenomenology, and new materialism through the theorizations of Sara Ahmed, Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, M. Jacqui Alexander, Édouard Glissant, José Esteban Muñoz, and Edward Kamau Brathwaite, among others. Ambitious in scope and captivating to read, Queer Tidalectics brings Caribbean writers like Glissant and Brathwaite into queer literary analysis—a major scholarly contribution.

This edited volume is the first to focus on how concepts of citizenship diversify and stimulate the long-standing field of law and literature, and vice versa. Building on existing research in law and literature as well as literature and citizenship studies, the collection approaches the triangular relationship between citizenship, law and literature from a variety of disciplinary, conceptual and political perspectives, with particular emphasis on the performative aspect inherent in any type of social expression and cultural artefact. The sixteen chapters in this volume present literature as carrying multifarious, at times opposing energies and impulses in relation to citizenship. These range from providing discursive arenas for consolidating, challenging and re-negotiating citizenship to directly interfering with or inspiring processes of law-making and governance. The volume opens up new possibilities for the scholarly understanding of citizenship along two axes: Citizenship-as-Literature: Enacting Citizenship and Citizenship-in-Literature: Conceptualising Citizenship.

The Global Trajectories of Queerness interrogates the term “queer” by closely mapping what space the theorizing of same-sex sexualities and sexual politics in the non-West inhabits. From theoretical discussions around the epistemologies of such conceptualizations of space in the Global South, to specific ethnographies of same-sex culture, this collection hopes to forge a way of tracking the histories of race, class, caste, gender, and sexual orientation that form what is called the moment of globalization. The volume, co-edited by Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala, asks whether the societies of the Global South simply borrow and graft an internationalist (read Euro-US) language of LGBT/queer rights and identity politics, whether it is imposed on them or whether there is a productive negotiation of that language. Contributing Authors: Sruti Bala, Laia Ribera Cañénguez, Soledad Cutuli, Roderick Ferguson, Iman Ganji, Krystal Ghisyawan, Josephine Ho, Neville Hoad, Victoria Keller, Haneen Maikey, Shad Naved, Guillermo Núñez Noriega, Stella Nyanzi, Witchayanee Ocha, Julieta Paredes, Mikki Stelder, Ashley Tellis, and Wei Tingting

A Space for Race engages in a critical examination of some of the major discourses related to original/settler/immigrant and, particularly, racialized belonging. In the course of this examination, the book explores the various themes of racism, multiculturalism, and post-colonialism and the ongoing tensions, challenges, and inconsistencies around race relations embedded within policy and practice in Canada. It traces the history of race relations and ensuing tensions from encounter to modern day and offers a broad, yet nuanced historical sketch of Indigenous and racialized ethnic groups that make up the Canadian landscape. The text also offers rich case examples to draw the reader's attention to the lived experiences of the "Other." As a whole, it engages with history in a particular way that challenges the historical records that has informed our imaginings.

The first book of its kind, Our Caribbean is an anthology of lesbian and gay writing from across the Antilles. The author and activist Thomas Glave has gathered outstanding fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and poetry by little-known writers together with selections by internationally celebrated figures such as José Alcántara Almánzar, Reinaldo Arenas, Dionne Brand, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde, Achy Obejas, and Assotto Saint. The result is an unprecedented literary conversation on gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered experiences throughout the Caribbean and its far-flung diaspora. Many selections were originally published in Spanish, Dutch, or creole languages; some are translated into English here for the first time. The thirty-seven authors hail from the Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Panama, Puerto Rico, St. Vincent, St. Kitts, Suriname, and Trinidad. Many have lived outside the Caribbean, and their writing depicts histories of voluntary migration as well as exile from repressive governments, communities, and families. Many pieces have a political urgency that reflects their authors' work as activists, teachers, community organizers, and performers. Desire commingles with ostracism and alienation throughout: in the evocative portrayals of same-sex love and longing, and in the selections addressing religion, family, race, and class. From the poem "Saturday Night in San Juan with the Right Sailors" to the poignant narrative "We Came All the Way from Cuba So You Could Dress Like This?" to an eloquent call for the embrace of difference that appeared in the Nassau Daily Tribune on the eve of an anti-gay protest, Our Caribbean is a brave and necessary book. Contributors: José Alcántara Almánzar, Aldo Alvarez, Reinaldo Arenas, Rane Arroyo, Jesús J. Barquet, Marilyn Bobes, Dionne Brand, Timothy S. Chin, Michelle Cliff, Wesley E. A. Crichlow, Mabel Rodríguez Cuesta, Ochy Curiel, Faizal Deen, Pedro de Jesús, R. Erica Doyle, Thomas Glave, Rosamond S. King, Helen Klonaris, Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Audre Lorde, Shani Mootoo, Anton Nimblett, Achy Obejas, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, Virgilio Piñera, Patricia Powell, Kevin Everod Quashie, Juanita Ramos, Colin Robinson, Assotto Saint, Andrew Salkey, Lawrence Scott, Makeda Silvera, H. Nigel Thomas, Rinaldo Walcott, Gloria Wekker, Lawson Williams

This Companion examines the connections between LGBTQ populations and American literature from the late eighteenth to twenty-first centuries. It surveys primary and secondary writings under the evolving category of gay and lesbian authorship, and incorporates current thinking in US-based LGBTQ studies as well as critical practices within the field of American literary studies. This Companion also addresses the ways in which queerness pervades persons, texts, bodies, and reading, while paying attention to the transnational component of such literatures. In so doing, it details the chief genres, conventional historical backgrounds, and influential interpretive practices that support the analysis of LGBTQ literatures in the United States.

This interdisciplinary volume investigates com-munity in postcolonial language situations, texts, and media. In actual and imagined communities, membership assumes shared features – values, linguistic codes, geographical origin, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, professional interests and practices. How is membership in such communities constructed, manifested, tested or contested? What new forms have emerged in the wake of globalization, translocation, and digital media? Contributions in linguistic, literary, and cultural studies explore the role of communication, narratives, memory, and trauma in processes of (un)belonging. One section treats communication and the speech community. Here, linguistic contribu-tions investigate the concept of the native speaker in World Englishes, in socio-cultural communities identified by styles of verbal duelling, in diaspora communities, physical and digital, where identification with formerly stigmatized linguistic codes acquires new currency. Divisions and alignments in digital communities are at stake in postcolonial African countries like Cameroon where identification with ex-colonizer and ex-colonized is a hot issue. Finally, discourse communities also exist in such traditional media as newspapers (e.g., the Indian tabloid in English). In a section devoted to narrative and narration, the focus is on literary perspectives – post-colonial memory, trauma, and identity in Caribbean literary works by David Chariandy and Pauline Melville and in Australian Aboriginal fiction; narratives of banditry in colonial India; xenophobia and urban space in South Africa; human–animal community crossings and anthropomorphism in Life of Pi. A third section, on linguistic crossings in transnational music styles in global and Ugandan music industries, examines language, style, and belonging in music cultures. The volume closes with a controversial debate on the agendas of academic/non-academic and postcolonial/Western communities with regard to homophobia in Jamaican dancehall culture. CONTRIBUTORS Eric A. Anchimbe, Susan Arndt, Roman Bartosch, Carolyn Cooper, Daria Dayter, Dagmar Deuber, Tobias Döring, Stephanie Hackert, Caroline Koegler, Stephan Laqué, Andrea Moll, Susanne Mühleisen, Jochen Petzold, Katja Sarkowsky, Britta Schneider, Anne Schröder, Jude Ssempuuma, Robert JC Young

In Erotic Islands, Lyndon K. Gill maps a long queer presence at a crossroads of the Caribbean. This transdisciplinary book foregrounds the queer histories of Carnival, calypso, and HIV/AIDS in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago. At its heart is an extension of Audre Lorde's use of the erotic as theory and methodology. Gill turns to lesbian/gay artistry and activism to insist on eros as an intertwined political-sensual-spiritual lens through which to see self and society more clearly. This analysis juxtaposes revered musician Calypso Rose, renowned mas man Peter Minshall, and resilient HIV/AIDS organization Friends For Life. Erotic Islands traverses black studies, queer studies, and anthropology toward an emergent black queer diaspora studies.