Please join the WGSI in congratulating Ryan Persadie who successfully defended his doctoral dissertation – “Sounding Qoolie Diasporas: Indo-Afro-Caribbean Relationalities, Chamkay Feminisms, and the Queer Politics of Fête in Toronto and New York City”
Supervisors: D. Alissa Trotz and R. Cassandra Lord
Committee: David Murray (York University), Farzaneh Hemmasi (Faculty of Music)
External Examiner: Gayatri Gopinath, NYU
Internal Reader: Jordache Ellapen
Abstract
This dissertation is a multi-sited ethnographic study into the politics and performance practices within what I term as “queer fête” geographies in Toronto and New York City. Queer fêtes refer to LGBTQI+-affirming and -led party-spaces that are inextricably linked to practices of Caribbean Carnival and soca music. In the fête, participants perform legacies of anti-colonial resistance, feminist erotic autonomy, and reclamations of the post-colonial Caribbean body linked to such rites. While the dominant fête scene in the Caribbean is largely structured through heteronormative paradigms, the queer fête emerges as a LGBTQI+ re-orientation of the mainstream fête scene that is practiced transnationally in the Canadian and US diaspora. In the queer fête, singing and dancing to soca music – the soundtrack of Anglophone Caribbean Carnival – operates as the embodied archive by which participants perform a transgressive politic of belonging within the diasporic space of Toronto and New York City. Particularly in relation to nationalist ideologies of racism, xenophobia, and homo- and transphobia that circulate in North American cities, the queer fête functions as a Carnivalesque geography that uses music, dance, and the voice to engender ideas of queer and trans Caribbean community-building. Simultaneously, participants mobilize fête politics to enact resistance and critique to structural forces of neo-colonial power. Such resistance speaks back to ideological, cultural and physical displacements of the queer/trans and racialized Caribbean subject within the queer diaspora.
This dissertation project explores the lives and stories of queer and trans Indo-Caribbean artists, participants, and organizers of queer fête spaces in Toronto and New York City. In this study, I explore how engagements with Afro-Caribbean cultural resources enable queer Indo-Caribbean, or what I refer to as “qoolie,” communities to pursue transgressive place- and self-making practices. Such racial crossings signal important transnational entanglements between Caribbean Indianness and Blackness that situate the diasporic Indo-Caribbean body as always-already queer (read here through non-normativity). I refer to the interstices of Indo-Caribbeanness and Afro-Caribbeanness as “Indo-Afro relationality” which becomes the central archive by which Indo-Caribbean queerness is cultivated and practiced in the fête. This dissertation accounts for how qoolie communities (re)produce the fête – and by extension Afro-Caribbean anti-colonial and feminist politics – as a critical itinerary and archive of new Indo-Caribbean selfhoods and diasporas. Performing such Indo-Afro relationalities re-orient the Indo-Caribbean body outside of nationalist and post-colonial discourses of compulsory heterosexuality. I refer to transgressive performances of Indo-Afro relationality to pursue new agentive possibilities for qoolie diasporas as “chamkay feminisms.” By turning to sound, dance, and party organizing strategies, this study uncovers how the qoolie body performs a queer politic of fête to enact new transnational feminist approaches to self, place, and community. Such politics are made possible through a qoolie pedagogy of listening, singing, and dancing together.
Congratulations, Ryan!