Queer creolization in Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco

This chapter argues that Chamoiseau’s sidestepping of the logic of biological kinship and genealogical lineage works to subvert the repeated invocation of Martinique’s ties to the “motherland,” France, thus enabling the diasporic and dialogic subjectivities of creolité. The novel offers a history of diasporic community formation on Martinique which questions and finally resists the demand for filiation, just as it does without the trope of motherhood. This reading of Chamoiseau’s novel also allows for a reconsideration of debates over creolization and Édouard Glissant’s notion of relationality, both of which have received renewed and increased attention, including in the anglosphere, in recent years. In order to make creolization useful for a queer postcolonial and diasporic critique, I argue that creolization must also be understood as a displacement from normative, national kinship, and that this then feeds back into recent debates on creolization as a global process, not one restricted to the Caribbean.

Introduction: Diasporic kinship across the black Atlantic

The introduction sets out the field of critical kinship studies and its relation to diaspora studies, black Atlantic studies and queer studies. It offers an overview of relevant works of diaspora and black Atlantic studies and queer studies, and how these fields are brought together in theorizations of queer diaspora. It then turns to the question of how to do critical kinship studies to suggest a double-pronged approach to the study of kinship. The study of kinship is both particularly interesting and particularly complex in postcolonial contexts, as kinship can be used both as a tool of colonial power and a means of anticolonial resistance, and the novels studied in this book suggest that kinship often does both.

Shattering the flow of history: Dionne Brand’s At the Full and Change of the Moon

In contrast to Levy, Dionne Brand’s novel represents a more radical postcolonial intervention in historiography. It demands a reassessment of the meaning of history and kinship, and their relationship to each other, in Black Atlantic contexts, suggesting that the experiences of slavery and the afterlife of slavery require and create alternative modes of relationality and subjectivity. Both normative kinship and history prove elusive and desirable, yet limiting and oppressive. National histories and colonial historiography are revealed as profoundly heteronormative, and it becomes clear that the diasporic lives of the novel's characters are queered by their displacement from national heteronormativity - yet queer does not necessarily mean liberating. Narrating these experience demands a similarly fractured, non-linear mode of writing, in which history and present subjectivities are generated in interaction with one another.

‘As constricting as the corset they bind me in to keep me a lady’: colonial historiography in Andrea Levy’s The Long Song

This chapter shows how that Levy’s neo-slave narrative demonstrates both the potential for fiction to overcome the gaps in colonial archives and the limits of a postcolonial rewriting strategy that remains modelled on colonial historiography. The novel dramatizes the editorial process involved in both forms of historiography; it makes visible the exclusions and omissions required in order to craft a history which will be understood and accepted as properly historical – and the way in which this process also demands certain norms of kinship: linear, genealogical and based on the nuclear family. Likewise, the novel suggests that conservative, constraining gender norms, particularly for black diasporic women, are the necessary cost of cultural intelligibility, ‘respectability’ and the promise of historicity. Thus while Levy’s novel makes clear the price of this rewriting and becoming historical, it remains unclear whether another mode of postcolonial rewriting of history – one which does not measure itself against colonial historiography – is possible.

Postcolonial sabotage and ethnographic recovery in Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

This chapter is the first of two on recent novels which rewrite and write back to key texts of anthropology. It first examines the way Kincaid’s 1996 novel conceptualizes postcolonial kinship and its understanding of the destruction, perversion and exploitation of intimate bonds by colonial rule. It then turns to the novel’s engagement with the tradition of ethnographic travel writing on the Caribbean, particularly that of Froude and Lévi-Strauss, to argue that the novel demonstrates the strategic use of a discourse of failure. By embracing, rather than rejecting, colonial accusations of civilizational lack in the Caribbean, the novel is able to effectively reflect back and thereby sabotage such imperialist ideologies. Nonetheless, the limits of this strategy of become clear in the novel’s imagination of the figure of Xuela’s Carib mother. Here, the novel’s embrace of a discourse of failure echoes, rather than undermines, colonial and anthropological accounts of Caribbean indigenous groups and their supposedly inevitable demise, and thus it also partly reproduces the ethnographic gaze.

Conclusion: Diasporic futures?

The conclusion shows how these six novels and their treatment of postcolonial, diasporic kinship offer a perspective on current debates on subjectivity, (post)humanism and modernity. These representations of diasporic experience rework the group identity traditionally associated with diaspora into a form of post-individual relationality, while also demonstrating the risks or limits attendant on such a strategy of becoming and social change. In particular, through these texts’ engagement with and rewriting of kinship, they are able to bring together reflections on the colonial history of kinship discourses, the forms of intimate resistance to colonialism, and the reverberations of both on forms of intimacy, family, and diaspora today. By rethinking and rewriting anthropology, historiography, and the meaning of loss and mourning, they challenge assumptions about the meaning and enaction of forms of intimate relationality to culture and subjectivity.

Writing self and kin: diasporic mourning in Jackie Kay’s Trumpet

This chapter considers how queer diaspora may be generated via mourning. Jackie Kay’s novel shows how mourning makes visible and performatively constructs kinship bonds, and that it is also an active process which rewrites the lives of the dead and living. This process of mourning and the constitution of self and kin in the novel takes place in the ‘diaspora space’ of contemporary Britain. Mourning is a force which creates queer diasporic bonds, affirming connections with the dead and transforming the living, enfolding the past into the future. It becomes clear that mourning and kinship are not only individually determined, but also influenced by a shared Black Atlantic history of loss, displacement and racialization. The novel suggests that two modes of kinship – one state-recognized, governed by genealogy or legal recognition, the other mobile, performative and created by shared experience and aesthetic creation – coexist in the context of late twentieth-century Britain, and that these latter, queerly diasporic notions of kinship have shaped contemporary Britain in numerous ways.

Destabilizing structuralism in Pauline Melville’s The Ventriloquist’s Tale

This chapter examines the way in which Melville's novel challenges the ongoing influence of classical anthropological discourses of kinship and indigeneity via its parodic representation of Lévi-Strauss, its exploration of the incest taboo, and its interrogation of the power of language and writing. The novel offers several intersecting stories which demonstrate the imbrication of discourses of kinship with those of nation, and it offers instead practices and understandings of kinship which are both Amerindian and diasporic. It stakes a claim for indigenous presence and participation in the cultures of the Black Atlantic, thereby challenging theories that define diaspora against indigeneity. Rather than capitulating to the anthropological claim that kinship is a structural basis for culture, the novel offers an alternative understanding of kinship based not on genealogy or sexual bonds, but on shared labour within a complete ecosystem.