The Queer Caribbean Speaks / New Caribbean Studies (PDF)

Kofi Campbell is Associate Professor of English, Associate Dean of the Faculty of Liberal Arts, and a member of the graduate program in Cultural Analysis and Social Theory at Laurier Brantford University, Canada. He is the author of Literature and Culture in the Black Atlantic: From Pre- to Postcolonial and has published several articles on postcolonial and medieval literatures.

“The Queer Caribbean Speaks: Interviews with Writers, Artists, and Activists … offer a comprehensive, interdisciplinary perspective on the representations and behind-the-scenes motivations of contemporary Pan-Caribbean cultural workers. … The Queer Caribbean Speaks is a valuable addition to queer Caribbean studies. … offer a deep understanding of the sociohistorical realities of the Caribbean, with detailed accounts of colonial and recent histories, legal codes, the effects of tourism, and pop culture phenomena.” (Patricia K. DeRocher, SX Salon_smallaxe.net, February, 2016)

"The rich reflections and testimonies of experience recorded in this book break the silence about queer Caribbean lifeworlds, imagined and configured through the confluence of local, national, regional, and transnational processes. The collection compels us to meaningfully reconceptualize both Caribbeanness and queerness as categories of meaning that articulate and unravel each other. As such, this book holds many possibilities for engaging what might be considered the queer turn in Caribbean Studies and for productively troubling the conceptual limits of 'Q'ueer Studies." - Amar Wahab, Assistant Professor in Gender and Sexuality, York University, Canada

"This timely collection of 14 interviews offers further momentum to current commitments to expand the horizon of possibilities for how we think, live, love and desire in the Caribbean. The queer Caribbean that speaks here includes writers, activists, a lawyer, a reggae artist and several teachers whose reflections on homophobia in the region are at once painful and powerfully moving to read. Campbell's questions generate remarkably open and generous responses, many of them threaded through with a yearning to feel - and be - at home within family and the Caribbean. The interview format results in wonderfully eclectic and fragmented personal insights, shaped by the very particular politics of location of each interviewee and