Jamaican Nationalism, Queer Intimacies, and the Disjunctures of the Chinese Diaspora: Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda

Abstract

Attentive to the disjunctures of the Chinese diaspora in the Americas, Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda intertextually reterritorializes the tropes of Asian American literature and cultural criticism in a Jamaican context in order to fashion what I call a queer utopian historical romance. The novel portrays a simultaneously pluralist and creolizing anticolonial nationalism emerging from queer intimacies that cut across the racial divisions of late nineteenth-century Jamaica. Not only does this displace the masculinist labor movements of the 1930s as the originary moment of anticolonial Jamaican nationalism, but The Pagoda also offers a Caribbean alternative to US-based models of ethnic literature, limning distinctive histories of racialization, creolization, and pluralism.

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