Late-Stage American Empire and Regimes of Queer Caribbean Visibility

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable takes up the questions and problems of late-stage American empire with a focus on the critical epistemologies that emerge from queer formations of gender and sexuality in the Caribbean. We are particularly interested in how empires of visibility, contextualized by legacies of both American and European colonialisms, have regulated how and if queer Caribbean subjects are seen both within and beyond the region. These regimes of visibility not only structure popular, literary, and scholarly representations of queer and trans life in the Caribbean, but they have often reproduced the region as a zone of pure and irrational violence.

This roundtable invites a consideration of what forms of media,cultural artifacts and activism disrupt or affirm these regimes of visibility. How do these media and cultural artifacts frustrate or reinforce these hegemonic paradigms for understanding the queer Caribbean? What methodologies and perspectives offer new and/or divergent ways of looking and knowing? Or how do they fail to do so?

This roundtable is also an invitation to imagine American Studies from the standpoint of these alternative social formations and networks of queered belonging, particularly among Black queer diasporas. How does the Caribbean region offer critical resources for understanding the present conjuncture? What kind of American Studies might these formations of gender and sexuality compel in a moment such as this that demands more than the language of solidarity and empathy?

Topics for roundtable discussion include, but are not limited to:
-Citizenship, migration and queer Caribbean diasporas. “Sexual Citizenship”, Citizenship from Below (Sheller 2012), liminal status and belonging.
-Pornography and Critical Porno Studies in / depicting the Caribbean region. Visibility, consumption and circuits of desire
-Racial formation in the Caribbean and in diaspora, including Indo-Caribbean culture and hybridity; Black Indigeneity and Garifuna self-making.
-Media depicting the Caribbean, including film and television such as Get Millie Black, Mr Loverman, Small Axe, Black Cake, and Brother.
-United States Foreign Aid, Non-profits and Caribbean NGOs. The politics of community organizing and / or relationship to late-Stage American Empire.
-The transnational exchanges between the United States, Canada and Caribbean forms of popular culture and vernacular
-Consumption, Tourism and “Caribbean Inhospitality” (Belisle 2025).
-Gender and sexuality in relation to finance, globalization, and labor in late-stage American empire, including: remittances, barrels and financial trickery (Lewis 2020)
-Archives, ancestral memory and the queer Caribbean; Queer Fractals (Chin 2024)

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Paul Joseph Lopez Oro, Bryn Mawr College

Panelists

• Hazim Abdullah-Smith, Wayne State University

• Jovanté Anderson, University of Virginia-Main Campus

• Paul Joseph Lopez Oro, Bryn Mawr College

• Ryan Persadie, Connecticut College

Biographical Information

Hazim Abdullah-Smith is Assistant Professor of History at Wayne State University and was (2023-2025) Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Cuyahoga Valley National Park. There, he focuses on public humanities projects related to 20th century histories of African American recreation, leisure and entertainment for the collaborative "Green Book Cleveland" project. In addition, his primary research investigates the intersection of tourism and queer life in Jamaica. He draws from popular culture, ethnography, archival research and digital tools to amplify complex stories about gender, sexuality and community formation in Jamaica and across Black queer diasporas. He completed his Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Maryland, College Park. With a commitment to interdisciplinary thinking, he earned graduate certificates in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. He completed his undergraduate degree in African American Studies from Northwestern University.

Jovanté Anderson is a sixth-year PhD candidate and predoctoral fellow at the Carter G. Woodson Institute for African American and African Studies at the University of Virginia. His dissertation traces the multiple imaginaries of erotic sovereignty that have been articulated through the circulation practices, the aesthetic investments, and the performance cultures of pornography in late colonial and postcolonial Jamaica. An archaeological and interdisciplinary inquiry, his research reads a diverse historical, literary, and visual set of archives from the early twentieth century to the contemporary moment, considering how pornography underwrites multiple and sometimes contradictory visions of what it means to be a modern Caribbean subject.Jovante has presented work at various annual meetings including the American Studies Association, The Caribbean Studies Association, West Indian Literature Conference, and Beyond Homophobia. His work has been supported by grants from the American Ethnological Society, the Center for Global Black Studies, and the Nomadic Archivist Project. He also has a journal article forthcoming in GLQ: Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies that examines contemporary trans aesthetics in relation to ecological crisis in the Caribbean. Beyond the academy, Jovante enjoys creative writing and was the first co-recipient of the Poet Laureate of Jamaica Young Writers’ Prize for Poetry in 2018. Jovante was also named “LGBT Person of the Year” by the Equality Foundation for All Jamaica in 2020 for work that he continues to do around queer and trans housing insecurity in Jamaica.

Dr. Paul Joseph López Oro is a transdisciplinary Black Studies scholar whose teaching and research interests are on Black Latin American and U.S. Black Latinx social movements, Black diaspora theories and ethnographies, and Black Queer Feminisms. His research interests include Black politics in Latin America, the Caribbean and U.S. AfroLatinidades, Black Latinx LGBTQ movements and performances, and Black transnationalism. He is working on his first book manuscript, Indigenous Blackness: The Queer Politics of Self-Making Garifuna New York, is a transdisciplinary ethnographic study analyzing oral histories, performances, social media, film, literary texts and visual cultures to unearth the political, intellectual, cultural and spiritual genealogies of Garifuna women and subaltern geographies of Garifuna LGBTQ+ folks at the forefront of Garifuna transnational movements in New York City. Indigenous Blackness offers new ways to approach hemispheric questions on the multiple ways in which Garifuna New Yorkers of Central American descent queerly negotiate, perform, contradict and articulate their Black, Indigenous and Central American Caribbean subjectivities.
Dr. López Oro received his doctorate in African and African diaspora studies from the University of Texas at Austin, his master’s degree in African American studies from Northwestern University, his master’s degree in Latin American studies from the University of New Mexico and his bachelor’s degree in history from St. John’s University. He has taught Black studies and Latinx studies courses at The University of Texas at Austin; Hunter College, The City University of New York; University of Virginia; John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York, and Smith College.

Ryan Persadie (he/him) is an artist, educator, and writer originally from Toronto, Canada. Currently, he is a senior doctoral candidate in Women and Gender Studies and Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. His aesthetic and scholarly work investigates queer Caribbean diasporas, transnational feminisms and sexualities, performance, and Afro-Asian intimacies. His current doctoral project specifically explores how Anglophone Caribbean music, dance, vocality, and embodiment offer salient archives to pursue critical pedagogies and practices of erotic place- and self-making within queer Indo-Caribbean diasporas. His writing can be found in the Stabroek News, Gay City News, MUSICultures, the Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies, the Canadian Theatre Review, the Caribbean Review of Gender Studies and the Journal of Indenture and Its Legacies among others. He also works with and organizes with multiple community groups including the Caribbean Equality Project based in Queens, NY. Outside of academia, he also performs as a drag artist under the stage name of "Tifa Wine".