A related island: Afro-queerness in Dominican and Haitian literature

This dissertation imagines a corpus of Haitian and Dominican literature, and centers representations of queer or non-conventional genders and literatures in contemporary, post-1980s, historical and speculative fiction by transnational Caribbean writers. I use a rhizomatic approach (across differences/ non-genealogical), to illuminate the island’s sexual and gendered subjectivities, which refuse the limits of nationalist, colonialist, and neocolonial usage of identity categories. Consequently, I counter the arborescent/ root tree or the genealogical model and its attendant fictions: the Hispanidad nationalism of the Dominican state and the hetero-normative family or raza as the most valuable roots of belonging. The fictions I explore transcend heteronormative and patriarchal constructions of bodies and nations; they show the transgressive relationalities of Afro-Caribbean bodies excluded from postcolonial nationalism, which defines itself though notions of “proper” and “natural” hetero-sexual citizenship. In order to do so, my dissertation grounds itself in Caribbean literature and sexuality studies, building on scholars invested in Black feminist and diasporic queer-of-color critique, as well as Caribbeanists working within Transnational Hispaniola. Chapter one analyzes the canonical literatures of the early 20th century—including the novel of the land as a key genre for producing antitotalitarian writing by both Dominican and Haitian authors—that set the discursive context for later narratives by queer writers. Chapter two explores three novels by Haitian novelist Kettly Mars. I analyze Saisons sauvages, L’Heure hybride, and Fado as representations of an expansive erotic subjectivity beyond hetero- and homosexuality. After Mars’s historical fictions, in chapter three I study the speculative history of the novel Tentacle by renowned Dominican artist Rita Indiana. I argue that Indiana adapts Afro- Caribbean popular culture to queer Dominicanidad and to represent alternative masculinities within the history of the nation. The next section focuses on diasporic cultural productions. Chapter four explores The Salt Roads by Nalo Hopkinson, a work that returns to the Haitian Revolution and relates colonial and metropolitan spaces. I argue that Hopkinson recovers Haitian dancer Jeanne Duval’s fluid erotic subjectivity as a way to dismantle dominant representations of Duval as merely the “dark Venus” or prostitute of Baudelaire’s modernist poetics. Chapter five reads the short fiction of two celebrated Hispaniola writers: Dominican American, Junot Díaz, and Haitian Canadian, Dany Laferrière. I argue their fictions show how Caribbean male bodies both perform and remake eroticized scripts about racialized masculinity in order to gain some measure of power. Chapter six concludes the dissertation with a reading of the novel Erzulie’s Skirt and the queer theory of diasporic Dominican writer and anthropologist Ana-Maurine Lara. I demonstrate that Lara’s narrative draws on the sacred space of Afro-spirituality to unify same-sex loving Dominican and Haitian bodies. It is a work where the spiritual is the grammar through which same-sex desiring women perform and voice their eroticism.

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