Black Queer Livingness in the Caribbean: alternative ecologies and praxis of repair and survival on Sint Maarten

• In Event: Practices of Creative Placemaking

Description for Program

This paper focuses on a group of Black queer working-class friends and their transient comradeship with other Black queer visitors to Sint Maarten. They embody what I call Black Queer Livingness – a relational process of nonnormative claim-making, mode of being, and practice of collective resistance and mutuality by narrating an alternative vision of humanness. I argue that these same sex loving, non-conforming relationalities occlude notions of respectability, the boundaries of nationhood, and the ordinariness of disaster on Sint Maarten. Having experienced disasters like Hurricane Irma on Sint Maarten, they practice being otherwise that calls into question racial hierarchical and oppressive colonial relations of power. By engaging in transgressive intimacies of space, relationality and sovereignty, they engage in a communal praxis of repair that emerges from the ruins of capitalist imperialism and ecological destruction. They navigate non-sovereign worlds restricted by capitalist tourist markets, heteronormative desire, political status and ecological realities to collectively survive on Sint Maarten They sustain intimacies through frequent outings to beaches, bars, restaurants, dance halls, and recreational spaces. In this way, I argue that through their everyday struggles and lives, they offer an alternative paradigm of Black repair and claims to sovereignty against entrenched plantocratic logics and geographies.

Author

• Keston Perry