Search

The “Introduction” to this Special Issue on “Recognition and Recovery of Caribbean Canadian Cultural Production” surveys the multiple creative directions and critical orientations of Caribbean Canadian cultural production and raises key questions about the grounds on which Caribbean Canadian cultural production is recognized, especially in Canada. The guest editors also explore the productive, but sometimes problematic, relationship between Caribbean Canadian archives and the nation, Blackness, Indigeneity, queerness, publishing, popular culture, and settler colonialism. Even so, the writers see the possibilities of communities of relations as well as political alliances between different constituencies in both Canada and the Caribbean in confronting racial capitalism and the many afterlives of colonialism. Re-conceptualizing Caribbean Canadian cultural production as an archive, rather than a field of study, allows the guest editors to recognize the importance of certain commitments and values: an investment in an ethically conscious methodology, a refusal of reductive and essentializing conceptualizations of race, gender, sexuality, as well as the modern human, and a desire to build collectivities of political alliances. The unbounded and sometimes ungrounded nature of the Caribbean Canadian inspires an openness to new ways of thinking about the politics of cultural production in Canada and beyond.

Austin Clarke in Nine Men Who Laughed and Ebony Patterson in her Gangstas for Life series both inspire an investigation of the way in which the “Black dandy” is an index of Black aesthetics as epistemology. Via a dialogue between Clarke’s Black male dandies of the post 1960s Toronto in his short stories and Patterson’s visualizations of the post 1980s dancehall dandies in Kingston, this article argues that Afro-Caribbean invocations of the Black dandy is more than fashion statement; it is epistemological stance. I am deliberately tracing a connection between dancehall dandies and Clarke’s saga boys in order to first show the legacy and consonance of Clarke’s work in Black epistemological thought as well as to indicate the trans-historical reach of the unfinished re-humanization project for Black subjects.

How might we understand the sexual body as a significant site for tracing the spatial imaginaries of Jamaican transnational crime? Garfield Ellis’s novel of transnational crime Till I’m Laid to Res...

Marlon James’s John Crow’s Devil (2005) demonstrates the value of speculative fiction for exposing queerness in “normative” worlds and revealing altered states of consciousness in both characters and readers. The novel’s fluid sexual-subjects and magic realist imaginings reveal the world as already unorthodox, as a place in which the sexual body becomes a site of queer desire and a source for shifting conceptions of gender, sexuality, and normality. Mining the trope of madness, the novel’s magic realist genre, and Sarah Ahmed’s notion of “queer phenomenology,” Michael A. Bucknor’s chapter exposes the normativity/alterity binary as establishing the metaphysical limits of sexual expression. By locating queer sexuality in the church and making guilt a source of mental breakdown, James acknowledges the ethical stakes in any attempt to shift the horizons of sexual expression.

since Foucault's association of language and power or his connection of dominant discourse with social privilege, we have become more sensitive to the ways in which the disciplining of unruly bodies as a means of asserting one's authority and power position has incorporated control of symbolic meaning. How gendered bodies, for example, are interpreted and made legitimate to a dominant group becomes central to its assertion of power. Often, however, the very aggression in these discursive assertions or the excessive language performance betrays the slipperiness of this attempt to confer or confirm power. What Noel Cowell has referred to as "exaggerated rituals"1 includes "exaggerated [speech] rituals", as Moji Anderson and Nadine McLean demonstrated in their article '"Straighten Up Your Argument': Language as Shibboleth of Jamaican Masculinity" which appeared in the previous issue of Caribbean Quarterly.2 Yet, this very hyperbolic verbal exhibition is an attempt to mask men's anxiety about and investment in the changing norms/roles/expressions of masculinity. In this way, "cock mouth kill cock" - in other words, it is what comes out of your mouth that condemns you, or the hyperbolic statements of hyper-masculine men expose their own embrace of the very subjectivities they appear to condemn and their own discursive investments. The more public the display, the more magnified the exposure is. And the very excess in public display seems to be a strategy to camouflage heteronormative and patriarchal complicity with transgressive intimacies. Public speech rituals contrasted with private transgressive intimacies expose the contradictory and complex negotiations of masculinities in Caribbean societies. As a way to theorise the complexity of gender construction in general, and masculinities in particular, Caribbean critics have been making significant use of popular culture. 3 In this special issue, for example, sociologists Clinton Hutton and Rhoda Reddock mine popular music to demonstrate the discursive manoeuvres of the everpersistent patriarchal operatives in the construction of Caribbean masculinities, but they are also aware of the ways in which those very strategies of legitimisation announce patriarchy's undoing. Both recognise the way in which sexual intimacy and women's bodies become central discursive tropes in the construction of 'legitimate' masculinities and in the disavowal of not so much alternative, but more accurately, subjugated versions of transgressive masculinity.The possibility of deviation from gender norms is recognised by those who seek to police these vulnerable stereotypes by their implicit acknowledgment that these are constructions open to transgression. Not surprisingly, patriarchy's fear of women's (and some men's) ability to challenge gender norms is performed in the theatre of sexual intimacies. Because of the recognition of the possibilities of transgression, women's bodies and their expressions of sexual intimacy have been heavily policed by anxious men. Of equal significance is a discursive surveillance - the ways in which the language associated with women and women's bodies becomes a way of marking the feminine as a site of deviance and deficiency and as the boundary line of legitimate masculinities. In this regard, Clinton Hutton's essay begins an excavation of how this primarily patriarchal stratagem works. Hutton locates in 1990s popular street expression and dancehall music what he calls the "gyalification complex". In examining the speech rimai of cursing that has elsewhere been associated with Afro-Caribbean men,4 Hutton shows how the female body is marked as a site of deviance from gender norms for some men. By marking these men as "gyal", their gender designation is hegemonically repositioned so that their masculinity is brought into question. Via what Hutton calls "symbolic castration", these patriarchal and hyper-masculine manoeuvres prepare the stage for violence to the body and in some cases involve making the "gyal-man" a passive sexual subject in a punishing aggressive sex ritual. …

Waiting in Vain, Colin Channer’s reggae romance, opens up a space for examining the performance of Caribbean masculinities abroad and, more significantly, the possibilities for rewriting the script for masculine identity performance by way of the radical aesthetics of reggae. Using Kwame Dawes’s examination of Channer’s engagement with textual seduction in Natural Mysticism (1999) as my point of departure, I will argue that the very strategies of textual seduction – the authorial excess in the aesthetic use of language, the super-idealized construction of the main character and the staging of audience reception – reinforce rather than rewrite ‘the troubling representations of Caribbean masculinities abroad’ (Coleman 1998: 30). Furthermore, situating Channer’s novel within the romance genre which aestheticizes romance, and within Dawes’s reggae aesthetics which romanticizes the erotic, compromises the attempt at a radical gender politics. If anything, textual self-reflexivity, not textual seduction, provid...