Mobilizing a Mathematics of Disturbance

Queer Caribbean bodies, subjectivities, and sensibilities have consistently shaped modern Caribbean histories, politics, cultures, and literature. Yet as scholars of the Caribbean we must contend with the vestiges of violence—how they mark our witnessing and how violence necessitates a reckoning to grasp the possibilities nestled in our pasts, which illuminate our present and future understandings of queer being in Caribbean space. 

Matthew Chin’s Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica adds to a growing body of robust scholarship with explicit focus on queerness in Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora studies. He attends to the calculations of gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation that (re)appear in the construction of contemporary Jamaican history as a means to repair the damage of heteropatriarchy. To do so, Chin places an array of sources in conversation, including newspapers, oral history interviews, government reports, performance videos, pamphlets, and novels, and uses fieldwork as a critical tool in constructing a spirited archive.¹ In particular, he extends the geometric configurations of “fractal” as a metaphorical entry for studying queerness because, as he writes in his introduction, “Queer Fractals: Making Histories of Repair,” fractals break with the past to produce nonlinear narratives opposed “not only to dominant narratives but also to prevailing modes of historical thought and methods of research” (7–8). 

What enlivens this study is Chin’s insistence on mathematics as a theoretical and methodological tool to interrupt the monotony of imperial, colonial, White supremacist, heteropatriarchal, and classist formulations of dominance, and how that interruption is critical to studying queerness in modern Caribbean space. He asks, To what extent does Caribbean queerness reconstitute the contours and practice of history making? How does this reconstitution, as fractals, produce opportunities for repair and mending? 

Crisscrossing modes of theorizing through queer, Caribbean, and women and gender studies, Chin’s introduction brilliantly presents his scope, argumentation, and implications. Weaving the interventions of scholars, such as Kamala Kempadoo, Deborah Thomas, Stuart Hall, Evelyn Hammonds, Katherine McKittrick, Eve Sedgwick, and Édouard Glissant, Chin creates a vibrant interdisciplinary ground through which to evaluate how Caribbean queerness becomes constitutive to historical thought. 

Queerness, in Chin’s formulation, mobilizes a mathematics of disturbance. Chin’s attention to these disturbances reverberates throughout the five-chapter study on repair, which includes two parts—“Archival Continuities” and “Narrative Ruptures.” Where “Archival Continuities” focuses on how queerness calls attention to normative formations in the archive, “Narrative Ruptures” shifts to how queerness functions to revise historical renderings of the past. Chin sets the stage in his first chapter, “Queer Jamaica, 1494–1998,” before entering these two parts. He unearths layers of national construction in Jamaica from 1494 to 1998 to reveal how queerness can be a tool for narrating Jamaica’s past through the burgeoning presence of marronage, mixed-race identities, gender ideology, and class stratification, especially as they relate to kinship networks—our relations with one another—to reveal the tensions that exist in shaping modern (queer) Jamaican life. 

In his successive chapters, themes of knowledge, the body, performance, and politics become concentrated sites for fractal repair. “Knowledge: A ‘Native’ Social Science,” Chin’s second chapter, delves into the construction of “native” social sciences in the anglophone Caribbean, pairing works by Edith Clarke, Judith Blake, M. G. Smith, and Fernando Henriques with articles from the Daily Gleaner, the Jamaica Daily Express, and the Jamaica Times and Roger Mais’s Black Lightning, Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron, and Andrew Salkey’s Escape to an Autumn Pavement. Chin argues that although these writings attempted to redress Black sexual deviancy, when read together they replicated structures of inequity in the archive (41). In his third chapter, “The Body: Responding to HIV/AIDS,” he turns our attention to how the development of knowledge about same-gender desire between 1983 and 1998 was predicated on a need to repair the “national body” in the context of HIV/AIDS (64). Chin gathers oral history interviews with HIV/AIDS survivors and their support systems, archival material from libraries, including the Ministry of Health, St. Andrew Public Library, the Red Cross, and the National Family Planning Board, and Patricia Powell’s A Small Gathering of Bones, Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone to Heaven, Godfrey Sealy’s One of Our Sons Is Missing, and Robert Cork’s An Existence Mirrored. He concludes that when centering queerness as an analytic, this period witnessed the development of an archive of sexuality in modern Jamaica where the overrepresentation of poor, working-class, Black gay men exposes disciplinary surveillance and reproduces who is read as legible in the archive (88). For example, as Chin critiques public health officials’ overemphasis of gay men’s subjectivity in relation to HIV/AIDS as a high-priority group, he intentionally reads Cliff’s and Cork’s works as useful in highlighting lesbian women’s experiences (84–85). 

In his fourth chapter, “Performance: The National Dance Theatre Company,” Chin brings readers into the world of Jamaica’s first national dance company. He uses queerness to rupture existing accounts of cultural decolonization on the island. Chin composes an archive from dance programs, news clippings, photographs, and rehearsal notes to oral history interviews with members of the National Dance Theatre Company’s early years and participant observations while taking contemporary company classes. Throughout, Chin foregrounds the centrality of queer kinship to “Jamaican’s self-understanding in the wake of empire” (95). For example, he brilliantly reads the company’s performance of Dialogue for Three for its potential to reveal an erotics forged through female domination that disrupts heteropatriarchal ideals of marriage and serves as a decolonial framing of sexuality in the nation’s consciousness. 

“Politics: The Gay Freedom Movement,” Chin's fifth chapter, examines the archives of the anglophone Caribbean's first self-proclaimed gay activist organization.² In particular, Chin weaves analyses of the Jamaica Gaily News, GFM’s newsletter, as well as photos, financial documents, and oral history interviews with several members or interlocutors of GFM. Chin forwards that GFM was an organization that challenged both the heteropatriarchy within Jamaica and the Euro-American dominance of gay politics through its transnational networks of grassroots organizing, persons in migration, and various attempts of community formation. Closing with “Epilogue: Fractal Futures,” Chin reengages a discussion of the utility of repair as a frame that reveals a politics of living with the past as a means of survival so that we do not repeat past traumas and inequities. 

Fractal Repair is part of a vibrant community of recent publications by Caribbean-identified scholars who center queerness in relation to Caribbean studies, including Ana-Maurine Lara’s Queer Freedom: Black Sovereignty (2020), Andil Gosine’s Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean (2021), Krystal Ghisyawan’s Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination (2022), Carlos Decena’s Circuits of the Sacred: A Faggotology in the Black Latinx Caribbean (2023), Nikoli Attai’s Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean (2023), and Preity Kumar’s An Ordinary Landscape of Violence (2024), to name a few. 

These works are refreshing, pushing the field of Caribbean sexuality studies to not only center queer subjectivity but also highlight the array of Caribbean subjects, in the region and the diaspora, who are contending with queerness in their lives. They are part of Thomas Glave’s refusal to be limited to “a slice of a slice” when gathering his anthology of lesbian and gay writing from the Caribbean.³ What distinguishes Chin’s text is his unabashed engagement with empiricism as it relates to the construction of a queer Caribbean archive. That said, I would have liked to hear more about fractal repair’s resonance beyond the anglophone space. For example, how have queer Jamaicans living in contexts such as the Netherlands contributed to the making of modern Jamaica? How could fractal repair function, if thinking with Rosamond King’s theorizing of the Caribglobal, in nonanglophone queer histories of the modern Caribbean?⁴

One of the brief yet noteworthy aspects of this monograph is Chin offering his experience of self-censorship as a queer Jamaican to illustrate a personal site for repair. As the reviewer, I found these gestures instructive and resonant, calling me to take stock of the parts of my own queer Jamaican geography in need of repair, in need of voice—another “becoming.”⁵ Broadly speaking, Fractal Repair is an invaluable text for those interested in Caribbean studies, the history of science, Black studies, queer studies, performance studies, feminist studies, and cultural studies. Chin’s curation of and care for this queer archive of modern Jamaica urgently reminds us that our past requires reconsideration in order for our present to be lived and our futures to be dreamed, over and over again. 

Warren Harding is an assistant professor in the Department of English at Binghamton University (SUNY). His research engages practices of reading, movement, women’s and feminist studies, and literary fieldwork in twentieth-century Caribbean and Afro-diasporic literary culture. In addition to sx salon, his writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Small Axe, Palimpsest, and MaComère.

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[1] See Shalini Puri and Debra Castillo, eds., Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

[2] The Gay Freedom Movement was in operation from 1977 to 1984.

[3] See Thomas Glave, Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles (Duke University Press, 2008), 4–5.

[4] See Rosamond King, Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (University Press of Florida, 2014), 2–7.

[5] See Kevin Quashie, “Queer. Caribbean. Miami. Boy: A Personal Geography,” Anthurium 16, no. 1 (2020): 2, https://anthurium.miami.edu/articles/10.33596/anth.367.