Fractal Repair
Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica

Description
In Fractal Repair, Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the island's global reputation for extreme homophobia and anti-queer violence. Chin advances a theory and method of queer fractals to bring together genealogies of queer and Caribbean formation. Fractals--a kind of geometry in which patterns repeat but never exactly in the same way--make visible shifting accounts of Caribbean queerness in terms of race, gender, and sexual alterity. Drawing on this fractal orientation, Chin assembles and analyzes multigenre archives, ranging from mid-twentieth-century social science studies of the Caribbean to Jamaica's National Dance Theatre Company to HIV/AIDS organizations, to write reparative histories of queerness. Chin's proposal of a fractal politics of repair invests in the horizon of difference that repetition materializes, and it extends reparations discourses intent on overcoming the past and calculating economic compensation for survivors of violence.
About this Author
Matthew Chin is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Virginia.
Reviews
"Fractal Repair provides a timely interventionist history of Jamaica through a Queer framework and expands scholarship on how we can understand the nation as a sociopolitical space informed by those who are deemed worthy of belonging."
"Chin... employs a provocative, theoretical framework grounded in mathematics, in particular fractal geometry, a field concerned with identifying repeating patterns that occur at irregular intervals. This unique historical approach allows Chin to untangle historical constructs of queerness, as well as expose colonial legacies that have shaped normative concepts of sexuality and gender in Jamaica. . . . Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals."
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