Between here and “not here”: Queer desires and postcolonial longings in the writings of Dionne Brand and José Esteban Muñoz

Abstract

This article examines the concepts of “not here” in Dionne Brand’s work and “not yet here” in José Esteban Muñoz’s work. These concepts are linked with queer desires, but also postcolonial longings and visions for other political and social possibilities. Both Brand’s and Muñoz’s writings rephrase and rearticulate various Third World social revolutions as part of their examination of queer possibilities, practices and narratives. Their work reinscribes and re-imagines histories and practices of marronage which have been central to Caribbean anticolonial thought, politics and narrative. A reading of Brand’s novel In Another Place, Not Here directly considers and examines its investments in marronage for constructing queer possibilities and futures. “Not here” references the historical and imaginative practices of Maroon flight that enables a rethinking of colonial histories and their interrelated structuring epistemologies of race, gender, sexuality and territoriality, and which enacts a move towards (re-)imagining queer possibilities and futures.

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