“Leave to quit boundaries”: Danger, precarity, and queer diasporas in the South Asian Caribbean

Abstract

ABSTRACT Caribbean writer A.R.F. Webber’s 1917 Those That Be in Bondage is the first novel of the South Asian Caribbean. In it, he locates migration and sexuality within larger colonial systems spanning economics, race, class, and gender norms. Shani Mootoo’s 2008 novel, Valmiki’s Daughter, shows how queer lives are shaped in the Caribbean, and how they are often on the move, intersecting with the objects and conditions of migration. From big oil in Trinidad and its local and global displacements, to colonial heteronormativity and the dislocation of desires in the present, these narratives compel us to critically evaluate how racialized genders and sexualities shape liminal diasporas in the Caribbean. This article assesses contemporary and historical diasporas, focusing on bodies dislocated by racialized heteropatriarchy in colonial and postcolonial contexts via the lens of anti-colonial queer phenomenology.