University of California Riverside

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE “Suspended Nameless in the Limbo State”: Neoliberalism and Queer Caribbean Diasporas A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Jessica Marie Best December 2013 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Weihsin Gui, Chairperson Dr. George E. Haggerty Dr. Jennifer Doyle Copyright by Jessica Marie Best 2013 The Dissertation of Jessica Marie Best is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “Suspended Nameless in the Limbo State”: Neoliberalism and Queer Caribbean Diasporas by Jessica Marie Best Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, December 2013 Dr. Weihsin Gui, Chairperson This project seeks to reveal the heterogeneous cultural histories embedded within queer diasporic Caribbean writing that challenge the United States’ political, economic, and cultural hegemony in the post-9/11 world. The goal is to examine the complicities, challenges, and escape routes created by queer imaginings, both utopic and pragmatic, rather than reconfigure essential characteristics of Caribbean diasporas as key components of nationalist, diasporic, or postcolonial identity. In revealing how different forms of desire, kinship, racial belonging, temporality, and positioning exist within and exceed our current notions of nation and diaspora, this dissertation goes beyond an understanding of the terms “queer” and “diaspora” as identities resistant to the nation- state and sees them as working towards a dismantling of neoliberal discourses and their hegemonic framework within the cultural spaces of North America and the Caribbean. This project will contextualize the nation to the settler-colonial space of the North American continent. It will not only consider how foreign policy directly relates to domestic concerns, but will take as its central understanding that “the state has always iv operated through sovereign power exacted through racial and colonial violence” (Smith, “American Studies” 310, original emphasis). This project will use queer diasporic writing to imagine alternative forms of being and belonging, while never presuming that “the United States should or will always continue to exist” (Smith, “American Studies” 312). Thus, it does not affirm nor celebrate state power or governmentality exercised by the U.S. state, even though it will examine authors and texts that exist within its national and cultural borders. Indeed, I will take a theoretically comparative approach by examining the intersections between postcolonial and queer theories, along with feminist, indigenous, and trans theories, to examine contemporary queer North American writing from the Caribbean diaspora. I employ these cultural discourses as tools for critiquing and dismantling dominant heteropatriarchal institutions, neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and homonormativity, which are key cultural and political components to United States hegemony. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction pgs. 1-19 Chapter 1 “Suspended Nameless in the Limbo State”: Orientalism and The Colonial Closet in Marlon James’s The Book of Night Women and Shani Mootoo’s Cereus Blooms at Night pgs. 20-78 Chapter 2 The Objects of My Affection: Animate Landscapes and Queer Attractions in Postcolonial Writing pgs. 79-125 Chapter 3 “Outside I was one way, Inside I was Another”: The First-Person Queer in Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao pgs. 126-174 Chapter 4 Queer Time in Diaspora: Historicism, Chrononormativity, and New Public Spheres pgs. 175-218 Conclusion pgs. 219-222 Notes pgs. 223-233 Works Cited pgs. 234-253 vi Introduction This project seeks to reveal the heterogeneous cultural histories embedded within queer diasporic Caribbean writing that challenge the United States’ political, economic, and cultural hegemony in the post-9/11 world. The goal is to examine the complicities, challenges, and escape routes created by queer imaginings, both utopic and pragmatic, rather than reconfigure essential characteristics of Caribbean diasporas as key components of nationalist, diasporic, or postcolonial identity. In revealing how different forms of desire, kinship, racial belonging, temporality, and positioning exist within and exceed our current notions of nation and diaspora, this dissertation goes beyond an understanding of the terms “queer” and “diaspora” as identities resistant to the nation- state and sees them as working towards a dismantling of neoliberal discourses and their hegemonic framework within the cultural spaces of North America and the Caribbean. Beginning with Homi K. Bhabha’s assertion that the nation is a narration ambivalently constructed by the conflicting discourses of the diasporic, the migrant, the indentured, and the interned, and is thus “internally marked by cultural difference and the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities, and tense cultural locations,” this dissertation will investigate the myriad diasporic discourses that insert themselves within the post-9/11 national ideology in the United States and Canada in order to challenge it from within and from without, thus resisting the “marginalistic integration of the individual in the social totality” and creating queer epistemologies that critique and disrupt dominant neoliberal and neocolonial discourses (“DissemiNation” 299 and 302, respectively). Further, this project will contextualize Bhabha’s concept of 1 the nation to the settler-colonial space of the North American continent. It will not only consider how foreign policy directly relates to domestic concerns, but will take as its central understanding that “the state has always operated through sovereign power exacted through racial and colonial violence” (Smith, “American Studies” 310, original emphasis). This project will use queer diasporic writing to imagine alternative forms of being and belonging, while never presuming that “the United States should or will always continue to exist” (Smith, “American Studies” 312). Thus, this dissertation is not trying to affirm or celebrate state power or governmentality exercised by the U.S. state, even though it will discuss authors and texts that exist within its national and cultural borders. Indeed, I will take a theoretically comparative approach by examining the intersections between postcolonial and queer theories, along with feminist, indigenous, and trans theories, to examine contemporary queer North American writing from the Caribbean diaspora. I employ these cultural discourses as tools for critiquing and dismantling dominant heteropatriarchal institutions, neoliberalism, neocolonialism, and homonormativity, which are key cultural and political components to United States hegemony. Recent theoretical work in queer theory has used postcolonial theory and diaspora studies to rethink traditional notions of the nation-state and diaspora in order to imagine what Gayatri Gopinath calls “impossible desires,” which refer not only to nonheteronormative sexual and romantic desires, but also to the varied longings for new ways of knowing, being, and belonging in the world. Scholars such as Gopinath, David Eng, and Jasbir K. Puar have used postcolonial theories to launch a critique of traditional 2 heteropatriarchal notions of the nation and diaspora, with Eng and Puar specifically focusing on queer diasporas located within the United States. These critics follow Lisa Duggan’s contention that “homonormativity” constitutes the “new neoliberal sexual politics” of the gay and lesbian movement, which is “a politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions, but upholds and sustains them, while promising the possibility of a demobilized gay constituency and a privatized, depoliticized gay culture anchored in domesticity and consumption” (50). Both Eng, who focuses on Asian and Asian-American artists, and Puar, who theorizes the figure of the Arab, Sikh, or Muslim “terrorist” in U.S. culture, expand Duggan’s understanding of homonormativity while using queer diasporas as a methodology to contest such hegemonic neoliberal institutions. Following the work of these critics, I will use literary texts from the Caribbean diaspora in North America to discuss these issues pertinent in the field of queer theory, thus wresting Caribbean diasporic writing away from its traditional theoretical home within feminist, postcolonial, and Caribbean studies in order to reveal the ways in which writers have creatively imagined new ways of making sense of the world that “work against totalization and homogenization, be it modernization, Westernization or Americanization, capitalism, or nationalism” (Krishnaswamy 3). This project will continue the work initiated by Duggan, Gopinath, Puar, and Eng by exploring the ways in which diasporic Caribbean writers have challenged neoliberal ideology since the 1990s and into the twenty-first century through queer writing—that which dismantles dominant notions of knowledge formation and ways of knowing; couplehood and sexual object 3 choice; racial belonging; individual identity; linear time, longevity, and historicity; citizenship and national belonging; along with empire and political resistance. The Neoliberal State One major goal of this project is to seek out the myriad ways of loving, desiring, knowing, articulating, and being in the world that are represented in the fictional work of queer Caribbean diasporic

Load more