Queer marronage and Caribbean writing

This thesis focuses on the writings of Michelle Cliff, Dionne Brand, Patricia Powell and Shani Mootoo and their representations of queer marronage. In the texts
discussed, I examine how these writers draw on the trope of marronage to call attention to ongoing neo-colonial, power structures, sexual hegemonies and the various strategies of social negation which curtail and regulate queer Caribbean lives. In my readings of these texts, I pay particular attention to their narration of queer experience in relation to the time of prohibition, crisis and social death which gave rise to New World Maroon communities in the context of slavery.

In bringing these two moments into conversation, these texts not only map the operations of parallel and persisting structures of power, they also narrate and
acknowledge shared responses across time. In doing so they open up a critical space into which this work intervenes. This thesis seeks to outline the shared practices of
resistance by queers and maroons, their strategies of community, their conditions and politics of belonging and their practices of survival.