Review of Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica by Matthew Chin (Duke University Press)

Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica. By Matthew Chin. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2024, 240 pp. (paperback) ISBN 978-1-4780-3022-5. US List: $26.95.

Matthew Chin begins Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica by presenting readers with a scene of antiqueer violence that is, at the same time, the acknowledgement of what Rinaldo Walcott describes as a queer presence.¹ Remembering when a classmate told him that there had been two battyman—a homophobic slur used in Jamaica—in their high school in Kingston, Chin suggests that this moment was, in retrospect, an opening into Jamaican queer history for him (2). Looking back at this moment is a methodological orienting that allows Chin to theorize the scene of the homophobic insult as a site of violence and possibility at the same time. This return to the past informs Chin’s fractal method throughout the rest of the book. “Turning back” to the past becomes an analytical approach that serves to locate moments of rupture within the constant replication of history-making patterns and find “the reparative capacity of history making in response to queer violence” (3).

In turning back, however, Fractal Repair does not “simply” set out to locate queerness and queer heroes in Jamaican history or to frame visibility as repair. Rather, Chin’s historical repair examines how Jamaican “individuals, communities, and institutions sought to redress” this violence and produce their own archives of repair (17). Throughout the book, Chin also interrogates and disrupts the colonial, heteropatriarchal power relations that rendered Jamaican queer histories and individuals invisible and perpetuated hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality, and class that limited what we can know about Jamaica’s erotic lives.

To perform this historical and narrative repair, Chin employs fractal geometry as a methodology with which to read the legacies of antiqueer rhetoric and violence from the island’s early settler colonial domination to the end of the twentieth century. In the introduction, Chin establishes fractal repair as his methodology and offers readers a comprehensive history of the violent ways mathematics has been intimately involved in the production of colonial knowledge about Jamaica. Reading queerness as a “site of rupture within patterns that repeat,” Chin tracks both these passive patterns and active sites of change in Jamaica’s queer history (18). 

Assembling an impressive repertoire of literary texts, performances, newspaper articles, written correspondence between queer people living in Jamaica and other parts of the world, and oral histories of members of the Gay Freedom Movement (GFM), the National Dance Theatre Company (NDTC), and health workers during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, Fractal Repair aims to repair and reinterpret our understanding of queerness in Jamaica. Chin is as interested in the possibilities for repair created by queerness in our study of Jamaica’s history as he is in that which tends to remain the same throughout: antiqueer violence; the construction of Jamaican queerness as the antithesis of the post-colonial, post-independence nation-state; the stigmatization and criminalization of HIV+ folks; and the respectability politics that increased the gap between the middle and lower economic classes nationwide.

Following the introduction, chapter 1 illuminates “the racialized arrangements of power” meant to regulate the interaction between race, gender, sexuality, and class, from the arrival of the Spanish in 1494 all the way to the end of the twentieth century (22). Throughout the chapter, queerness indexes performances of race, gender, sexuality, and class by the enslaved and the nominally emancipated, the Chinese and Indian indentured workers, and by members of the lower and working classes that unsettled the Western social and familial order. By showing how the British colonial authorities and the Jamaican middle and upper classes framed Blackness and queerness as antithetical to each other from the 1940s onwards, Chin theorizes queerness in Jamaica as a source of anxiety and disruption in the formation of an independent Jamaican nation-state that needed to conform to the West’s heteropatriarchal values.

Part one of the book, “Archival Continuities,” focuses on the passive patterns of archival continuity, or the “asymmetries embedded in existing archival arrangements” (41). In the two chapters that comprise it, Chin explores the materialization of queerness as difference and the stable backdrop of imperial knowledge and the national body that makes said difference legible (18). Chapter 2, “Knowledge: A ‘Native’ Social Science,” analyzes the turn to the anthropological study of the West Indian subject and community as a response to the pathologization of Black sexualities and forms of kinship at the hands of ethnographers during colonialism. Consulting stories from the Gleaner, literary texts like Sylvia Wynter’s The Hills of Hebron, and the work of anthropologists like Fernando Henriques, Chin shows that queerness was acknowledged in Jamaica only as something that existed in the margins—among the lower classes and Afro-Jamaican female Pukumina practitioners, more specifically—and was said to be either “imported” from Britain by police officers or induced by white tourists visiting Montego Bay. However, Chin opens the possibility of historical repair by reminding us of the potential of approaching Pukumina’s performance of sexual and gender non-normativity as a site “through which to work through and reconstruct a history of queerness in Jamaica” that centers Afro-Jamaican working-class women who practice Pukumina and other Afro-Creole religions rather than foreign white men (53).²

Chapter 3, “The Body: Responding to HIV/AIDS,” juxtaposes Jamaican authorities’ attempts to protect the heteropatriarchal Jamaican body politic by framing HIV/AIDS as a “homosexual disease” with the testimonies of health workers tasked with navigating the hypervisibility of the disease as well as the role they played as ethnographers of Jamaican sexuality. Chin exposes how Jamaica’s social hierarchies were meant to shield both queer and straight Brown and white middle-class folks from suffering the same dehumanization as their Black and working-class counterparts, who had to rely on health workers’ sympathy and ability to keep their identities and diagnoses a secret.

The second half of the book, “Narrative Ruptures,” explores the potential for historical rupture by materializing new histories of Jamaica’s post-1962 period. In chapter 4, Chin explores the formative years of the NDTC and the reception of the company’s performances and cast by a Jamaican nation-state intent on promoting its image after independence. Chin’s queer fractals method is particularly productive here given that the book’s study of the NDTC’s performance of queer intimacies, especially among women, triggers active lines of queerness that defy both the official story of the company promoted by the Jamaican government, as well as the nation’s heteropatriarchal culture. In Chapter 5, “Politics: The Gay Freedom Movement,” Chin revisits the history of the GFM, the first self-proclaimed gay activist organization in the English-speaking Caribbean, which acted not only as a rights organization in Jamaica but also as a system of support and community-building for the queer community on and off the island. Situating the GFM’s efforts alongside rather than separate from the achievements of the feminist movement during the 1970s and 80s, Chin illustrates the value of (queer) fractal repair as a method of narrative and historical rupture.

Chin’s concluding remarks in the book’s brief epilogue are a reminder of how our present is still shaped by the systems and structures of our past. Chin’s fractal method of historical repair does not seek to offer us a clean break with the past; instead, it encourages us to turn back and reinterpret the power relations and history making practices that produce our past while remaining open to the possibilities of our future. In his use of the fractal, Chin builds on the intellectual legacies of Édouard Glissant, Ron Eglash, Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Erna Brodber to explore the recursive shapes produced by the relation between Caribbeanness and queerness. Like the method it offers, Fractal Repair reproduces the knowledge created in the past while presenting us with new possibilities, a repetition that entails a difference with every iteration.³