Jamaican Nationalism, Queer Intimacies, and the Disjunctures of the Chinese Diaspora: Patricia Powell’s The Pagoda
Year: 2011
Type: article
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.
Author: Jason Frydman
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2000228863