Black atlantic, queer atlantic: Queer imaginings of the middle passage

GLQ

Volumn 14, Issue 2-3, 2008, Pages 191-215

  Tinsley, Omise'eke Natasha ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 43949103094     PISSN: 10642684     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10642684-2007-030     Document Type: Article

References (54)

1. Kale Fajardo, "Filipino Cross Currents: Histories of Filipino Seafaring-Asia and the Americas" (address, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, February 14, 2005).
2. See Roderick Ferguson, Aberrations in Black: Toward a Queer of Color Critique (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 4-10.
3. "Slavery in New York," New-York Historical Society, October 7, 2005-March 26, 2006.
4. See Fajardo's forthcoming manuscript, "Filipino Cross Currents: Oceanographies of Seafaring and Masculinities in the Global Economy."
5. On the importance of reimagining what constitutes an archive in queer studies, see Judith Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place (New York: New York University Press, 2005), 169-74.
6. M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 290.
7. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 292.
8. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 17.
9. Antonio Benftez-Rojo, The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 2.
10. Benftez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 16.
11. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 83.
12. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 201.
13. Benftez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 5.
14. Benítez-Rojo, Repeating Island, 29.
15. A number of recent studies have reworked the concept and space of the black Atlantic to take class and materiality into serious consideration. These include the creative, groundbreaking work of Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker in The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (Boston: Beacon, 2001) and Ian Baucom's Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). These imaginative materialist revisions, however-particularly the insistent heterosexualizing of romance (even among pirates!) in The Many-Headed Hydra - still continue some of the unqueered sexual politics of their predecessors.
16. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, in The Classic Slave Narratives, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1987), 32.
17. Quoted in Charles Johnson and Patricia Smith, Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery (New York: Harcourt, 1998), 72.
18. Ana-Maurine Lara, Erzulie's Skirt (Washington, DC: Red Bone, 2006), 173.
19. Sally Price and Richard Price, Two Evenings in Saramaka (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 3, 396, 207.
20. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British West Indies, vol. 2 (1794; rpt. New York: AMS, 1966), 94.
21. See also Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry, Description topographique, physique, civile, politique et historique de la partie française de l'isle Saint Domingue, 3 vols., ed. Blanche Maurel and Etienne Taillemite (1797; rpt. Paris: Société de l'histoire des colonies françaises, 1958), 1:77.
22. Gloria Wekker, Ik ben een gouden munt (Amsterdam: Feministische Uitgeverij VITA, 1994), 145, translation mine. The original Dutch reads: "In verschillende delen van de Diaspora de relatie tussen mensen die op hetzelfde ship naar de 'Nieuwe' Wereld overgekomen waren, een bijzondere bleef. Het Braziliaanse 'malungo,' het Trinidadiaanse 'malongue,' het Haitiaanse 'batiment' an het Surinaamse 'sippi' en 'mati' zijn allemaal voorbeelden van die speciale, niet-biologische, symbolische band tussen twee mensen van dezelfde sekse."
23. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2001), 61.
24. These details of Dominican migration to Puerto Rico have been reported widely in the press. For a sampling of such reportage, see the Puerto Rico Herald's collection of articles at puertorico-herald.org/issues/2004/ vol8n07/DesperIslHop.html (accessed February 8, 2008).
25. Ana Lara, unpublished interview by Naomi Wood, October 2006.
26. Lara, Erzulie's Skirt, 233.
27. Lara, Erzulie's Skirt, 159-60.1 choose not to translate the poem into English to maintain the opacity of the Spanish in the original. An indirect translation is contained in the following paragraph, as I discuss.
28. Dionne Brand, What We All Long For (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2005), 309.
29. Rinaldo Walcott, "Outside in Black Studies: Reading from a Queer Place in the Diaspora," in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 93.
30. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York: Routledge, 1999), 176.
31. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 8.
32. Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.
33. Sedgwick, Tendencies, 8-9.
34. Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi.
35. Butler, Gender Trouble, xvi-xvii.
36. See Rehoboth's official promotional Web site, www.rehoboth.com/beaches. asp.
37. See Alexs Pate, West of Rehoboth (New York: William Morrow, 2001).
38. See Michelle Cliff with Judith Raiskin, "The Art of History: An Interview with Michelle Cliff," Kenyon Review 15 (Winter 1993): 69. While there are many other texts that undertake representations of female same-sex eroticism in the Caribbean before Brand's, including the work of Eliot Bliss, Ida Faubert, Mayotte Capécia, Michèle Lacrosil, Nadine Magloire, and Astrid Roemer, No Language Is Neutral does become a "breakout" queer text in the anglophone Caribbean.
39. Maya Mavjee, "Opening the Door: An Interview with Dionne Brand," Read Magazine, March 28, 2003, www.randomhouse.ca/readmag/ page28.htm.
40. Dionne Brand, personal communication, Toronto, October 20, 2006, after hearing a paper in which I presented this reading of A Map to the Door of No Return.
41. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 19.
42. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 20.
43. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 43.
44. See Chela Sandoval, Methodologies of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000);
45. Butler, Gender Trouble, xxvii.
46. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 212.
47. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 213.
48. See Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004).
49. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 197.
50. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 195.
51. Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 288.
52. Brand, Map to the Door of No Return, 141.
53. See Gloria Wekker, The Politics of Passion: Women's Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 215.
54. I am inspired here by Rachel Carson's classic The Sea around Us, which explains: "Wherever two currents meet . . . there are zones of turbulence and unrest. . . . At such places the richness and abundance of marine lift reveals itself most strikingly" (The Sea around Us [New York: Mentor, 1950], 50).