Queer Caribbean Performance

Catalog description

With its' lush and fantastic landscape, fabulous carnivalesque aesthetics, and rich African Diaspora Religious traditions, the Caribbean has long been a setting which New World black artists have staged competing visions of racial and sexual utopia and dystopia. However, these foreigner-authored fantasies have often overshadowed the lived experience and life storytelling of Caribbean subjects. This course explores the intersecting performance cultures, politics, and sensual/sexual practices that have constituted queer life in the Caribbean region and its diaspora. Placing Caribbean queer of color critique alongside key moments in twentieth and twenty-first century performance history at home and abroad, we will ask how have histories of the plantation, discourses of race and nation, migration, and revolution led to the formation of regionally specific queer identifications. What about the idea of the 'tropics' has made it such as fertile ground for queer performance making, and how have artists from the region identified or dis-identified with these aesthetic formations? This class will begin with an exploration of theories of queer diaspora and queer of color critique's roots in black feminisms. We will cover themes of exile, religious rites, and organizing as sights of queer political formation and creative community in the Caribbean.