Join the IHGC community in celebrating the recent publication of Matthew Chin's Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica. In this work, published by Duke University Press, 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.
This event will include an introduction from Dr. Njelle Hamilton (Department of English) and will feature a brief presentation from Chin followed by a Q&A moderated by Jovante Anderson (Pre-Doctoral Fellow, English). Please register for the event by March 10th. Registrants may stop by the IHGC for FREE COPIES of the book, while supplies last.