Sixteenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

This paper explores the ways in which the “duppy,” or malevolent spirit, circulates the fictive landscape of the queer novels of Michelle Cliff of Jamaican ancestry and Shani Mootoo of Trinidad and Tobago ancestry. I explore the ways in which the unhappy ghost is a figure which comments socially on the sexual pathology of postcolonial queerness in the Caribbean. I focus on the characters of Clare in “Abeng” and Mala in “Cereus Blooms at Night” in a bid to elucidate that ways that Caribbean lesbianism invokes, on the one hand, what M. Jacqui Alexander calls “erotic autonomy as a form of decolonization politics” in the material eroticism of women characters. On the other hand and at the same time, however, these practices resurrect specters of dissent that index queerphobia in the Caribbean that is a direct result of exploitative tourism and economic strangulation by the IMF and World Bank. For example, the haunting figure of Robert in Cliff’s novel is denied queer existence, this takes his own life and, in death, becomes a queer spectre that haunts the lonely environs in which he killed himself. In this fraught scenario, the sexual other must be produced before and beyond the grave as a means for justifying past and ongoing legacies of economic enslavement.