"On These Little Islands, These Things Happen": Leprosy, Race, and Postcolonial Fictions of Chacachacare.

Abstract

Closely reading and historicizing three contemporary postcolonial fictions about the Chacachacare leper colony in Trinidad, this essay makes the case for more sustained attention to race, colonialism, and infectious disease in disability studies. Employing the concepts of hybridity and encamped ethnicity, the essay shows that leprosy was racialized in the Caribbean context among the Black populace in the wake of slavery and subsequently among the East Indians in the aftermath of indenture. It further argues that leper colonies such as the one in Chacachacare were not merely incarcerating and immobilizing but spaces where racial and ethnic identities were always being negotiated in conversation with their disabled status. The primary texts under study show how these colonies within colonies manifested both imperial mobilities and immobilities, at times hybridizing different races and ethnicities through the fluidity of Caribbean creolization and at others subjugating them to the rigid encamped ethnicity of "leper."