Knowledge

• Format: Book Part
• Language: unknown
• Published: Duke University Press 2024
• Subjects: North Atlantic
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/9781478059233-003; https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/monograph/chapter-pdf/2062360/9781478059233-003.pdf

This chapter focuses on the institutionalization of a “native” tradition of social science inquiry across the English-speaking Caribbean in the mid-twentieth century. This impulse took shape partly in response to colonial epistemologies that pathologized working-class Afro-Caribbean kinship patterns. By investigating intimacies that departed from North Atlantic models of nuclear family, social scientists produced knowledge that nationalists later mobilized to support claims of Caribbean distinctiveness. This chapter revisits the archives of this anticolonial response to consider how the workings of coloniality make distinctions among various gender and sexual peculiarities by analyzing the kinds of historical evidence they leave behind. It argues that interrelated workings of color, class, gender, and nation shape the ways that queerness is inscribed in, and as, Jamaica’s past. For this reason, foreign white “homosexual” men, gender transgression in the Afro-Creole spiritual tradition of Pukumina, and middle-class male intimacies materialize very differently across Jamaica’s formal archival collections.