Fractal Repair Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica

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.