Abstract
Waiting in Vain, Colin Channer’s reggae romance, opens up a space for examining the performance of Caribbean masculinities abroad and, more significantly, the possibilities for rewriting the script for masculine identity performance by way of the radical aesthetics of reggae. Using Kwame Dawes’s examination of Channer’s engagement with textual seduction in Natural Mysticism (1999) as my point of departure, I will argue that the very strategies of textual seduction – the authorial excess in the aesthetic use of language, the super-idealized construction of the main character and the staging of audience reception – reinforce rather than rewrite ‘the troubling representations of Caribbean masculinities abroad’ (Coleman 1998: 30). Furthermore, situating Channer’s novel within the romance genre which aestheticizes romance, and within Dawes’s reggae aesthetics which romanticizes the erotic, compromises the attempt at a radical gender politics. If anything, textual self-reflexivity, not textual seduction, provides the space for radical politics in this novel. In the end, though, I am still left with the question: is reggae’s limited revolutionary potential regarding questions of gender and sexuality indicative of its own roots in conventional masculinities?
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