(TRANS)NATIONALISMS, MARRONAGE, AND QUEER CARIBBEAN SUBJECTIVITIES

This discussion focuses on discourses of queer subjectivity, Maroon identity, and their relationship to Caribbean nationalism. A key aspect of my argument here is the idea that both queerness and marronage are marked by complex insider/outsider identity positions that resist and complicate binarist discourses of belonging and unbelonging. I situate them instead as “crossroads identities” shaped through processes of the contestation and refashioning of dominant national cultures. In discussing these complex intersecting concepts and identities, I point to the ways in which transnational discourses marked by an ongoing engagement with the paradoxes and tensions of belonging and non‐belonging—potentially offers another framework for the conceptualization and mobilization of these identities. Framing marronage and queerness as transnational offers a useful opportunity to reassess and broaden the ways in which discourses of transnationalism have been applied to the reading of Caribbean cultural contexts.