“Our lives were linked with streams”: Notes Toward A Riverine Intimacy
Topics: Caribbean Geographies
, Queer and Trans Geographies
, Black Geographies
Keywords: rivers, intimacy, human rights
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 05:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 06:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 61
Authors:
Jovante Alex Anderson, University of Miami
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Abstract
If, as Derek Walcott declares, the sea is history, so too is the river. Across the diaspora, rivers flow with the terrors and ecstatic pleasures of black social life. Taking up Jamaica, the land of wood and water, as a space of study, I argue that rivers are also sites of mischief which I am articulating here as a practice in pleasurable troublemaking. Mischief is dangerous; it is not yet freedom and it hardly ever aspires to any linear, intentional, centralized notion of political transformation. Rather, mischief lingers in a mode of improvisation, privileging an unruliness that revels in its own anarchic potential.
Following the course of the river in the Bedwardist Movement, the work of Claude McKay and Michelle Cliff, as well as early twenty-first century Jamaican pornography, I map a nomadic and opaque sensuality, a queer intimacy, that escapes enclosure. Rivers, flowing out from mountains, between valleys, diverging and converging with each other, running underground, through caves, and above ground, constantly changing course, offer the opportunity, both materially and metaphorically, to think a rhizomatic politics of queerness in Jamaica, one that might challenge the contemporary encroachment of North American human rights discourses and its demands for particular kinds of in/visibility.
“Our lives were linked with streams”: Notes Toward A Riverine Intimacy
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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