Writing (bitter)sweetness: queer ecologies of the sugar plantation in Caribbean literature

Abstract

This dissertation takes the works of four queer and lesbian diasporic Caribbean writers to investigate what a queer ecological analysis of Caribbean literature may engender in an age of climate change. Bringing scholarship from queer ecology and Geography to bear on a decolonial and ecofeminist literary analysis, the following investigation takes interdisciplinarity at its fore to reflect the tentacular and interwoven nature of our ecological age and its layers of sedimented histories. It draws on the Haitian creative practice of rasanblaj by which pieces of fabric are brought together to present a complex whole. As a central point in this tapestry, the sugar plantation is used as both metaphor and landscape through which to ask what it means for queer writers to address and reclaim this bittersweetness, building on the work of Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley with ecological and geographical scholarship. Tracing this sugar from the Caribbean, across oceans, and to diasporic cities in the Global North through storytelling, it investigates what it means to write bittersweetness in all its entanglements