Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbean [Paperback]

Creolized Sexualities: Undoing Heteronormativity in the Literary Imagination of the Anglo-Caribbeandraws 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 Sexualitieshows 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.By showing how a wide, and surprising, range of Caribbean writers have contributed to the crafting of a supple and inclusive erotic repertoire across the second half of the twentieth century, the readings in this book aim to demonstrate that a recognition of creolized and pluralized sexualities already exists within the literary imagination.ALISON DONNELLis a professor of modern literatures in English and head of the School of Literature, Creative Writing, and Drama at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England.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’sValmiki’s Daughter
3 Caribbean Freedoms and Queering Homonormativity: Andrew Salkey’sEscape to an Autumn Pavement
4 Queering Cló¾