Overview

In Fractal Repair, Matthew Chin interrogates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the island's reputation for homophobia and anti-queer violence. Chin advances a framework of queer fractals to bring together theories of queer formation and Caribbean subjectivity. Fractals-as a kind of repeating pattern in which each new iteration is just slightly different from the one before-make visible shifting accounts of Caribbean queerness in terms of race, gender, and sexual alterity. Drawing on this framework, Chin engages archives ranging from mid-twentieth-century social sciences of the Caribbean to Jamaica's National Dance Theatre Company to HIV/AIDS organizations to write reparative historical accounts of queerness in Jamaica. Ultimately, Chin proposes a fractal politics of reparations invested in the difference of repetition that extends existing discourses of overcoming the past and calculating economic compensation for survivors of violence.

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9781478030225

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Reviews

“In Fractal Repair, Matthew Chin contributes significantly to our understanding of the history and the present of queer Jamaican life. Chin fills in the gaps on queer organizing in Jamaica, making use of the archive to piece together a different account of queer Jamaica than usually circulates. It is a lively read, deeply thoughtful, and does what it means to do: repair our understanding of queer Jamaican life and politics.” -- Rinaldo Walcott, author of * The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom * “Matthew Chin’s Fractal Repair is an original and deeply compelling account of five hundred years of Jamaican intimacies. The fractal is a powerful organizing principle for the argument being made here, in which Chin shows how the colony has been central to the imperial rationalization of who counts as fully human and which intimacies are deemed to be socially valid. Archivally innovative, methodologically heterogeneous, and beautifully written, this book will make an important intervention.” -- Faith Smith, author of * Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century * ""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."" -- Jamella N. Gow * Ethnic and Racial Studies * ""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."" -- F. H. Smith * Choice *

“In Fractal Repair, Matthew Chin contributes significantly to our understanding of the history and the present of queer Jamaican life. Chin fills in the gaps on queer organizing in Jamaica, making use of the archive to piece together a different account of queer Jamaica than usually circulates. It is a lively read, deeply thoughtful, and does what it means to do: repair our understanding of queer Jamaican life and politics.” -- Rinaldo Walcott, author of * The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom * “Matthew Chin’s Fractal Repair is an original and deeply compelling account of five hundred years of Jamaican intimacies. The fractal is a powerful organizing principle for the argument being made here, in which Chin shows how the colony has been central to the imperial rationalization of who counts as fully human and which intimacies are deemed to be socially valid. Archivally innovative, methodologically heterogeneous, and beautifully written, this book will make an important intervention.” -- Faith Smith, author of * Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century *

Author Information

Matthew Chin is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Virginia.

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