Contact Information
Biography Information
Lyndon K. Gill is a doctoral candidate in African/African American Studies and Anthropology at Harvard University. He holds a B.A. with honors and distinction in African and African American Studies from Stanford University (2003) and an A.M. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University (2005). His scholarly interests include racial formation and diaspora, the socio-scientific construction of sex and gender, sexuality as a category of cultural analysis, queer cultural production, ritual and corporality within performance genres, desire and the erotic, and post-coloniality. His current research project- for which he received a 2007-2008 Fulbright Fellowship- investigates queer cultural production in Trinidad and Tobago, W.I. as well as throughout the Trinbagonian diaspora. His dissertation is entitled _Transfiguring Trinidad and Tobago: queer cultural production, erotic subjectivity and a new post-colonialism_. Lyndon has been known to write and perform poetry at whim.
Project Description
My dissertation proposes a new paradigm for Caribbean cultural analysis by foregrounding the work of same-sex desiring communities and artists in the region. To date, no book-length scholarly study of same-sex desiring, Anglophone Caribbeans has been published. In order to fill this lacuna and re-map the overlapping terrain of Caribbean and postcolonial studies, I encourage an epistemological framework that combines attention to the political, the spiritual and the sensual1 — what I have termed “erotic subjectivity”— in the quotidian experience, community-building work and artistry of gay Trinbagonians.2
A shifted perspective on Caribbean subjecthood, erotic subjectivity offers a conceptual background against which to reframe the relationship between queer Caribbean sexuality and the postcolonial tropes of nation, culture and identity. By combining an ethnography of queer communities in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) with an analysis of the work of two same-sex desiring Trinbagonian artists, my research contributes to the elaboration of a queer West Indian cartography.
In order to focus this project, I have selected a representative work from each of the two artists: McCartha “Calypso Rose” Lewis’ 1968 song “Pallet,” a multi-lingual engagement with female same-sex desire by way of double entendre; and Peter Minshall’s 2006 carnival masquerade presentation The Sacred Heart, an HIV/AIDS awareness project. Not only are these particular works especially important aesthetic and socio-cultural interventions in T&T and the wider Caribbean region, but they also represent two extant genres (calypso and carnival) through which the Trinbagonian nation-state imagines and represents itself throughout and beyond the region. To this dialogic analysis of these individual artists’ work, I add an oral history-based ethnography— of gay communities in oft ignored Tobago as well as in larger cosmopolitan Trinidad— crafted around an exploration of Friends For Life (FFL). Founded in 1997, FFL is one of the few HIV/AIDS non-governmental organizations in the region that is principally run by and for same-sex desiring communities. This project attends to the fertility of juxtaposing the HIV/AIDS prevention and support work of this NGO alongside the aesthetic work of Lewis and Minshall.
One of the most culturally diverse nations of the Caribbean region, Trinidad and Tobago is here representative of Caribbean cultural diversity. Trinbagonian culture is always already multiple even within its littoral confines. Thus, T&T serves well as a point of departure for a re-articulation of Caribbean Studies with Gender/Sexuality Studies. At the hinge of this convergence is the orienting concept of erotic subjectivity. This epistemological position is indebted to Caribbean-American lesbian feminist writer Audre Lorde’s re-conceptualization of the sensual as a bridge between the political and the spiritual. The various stories of everyday life as told by same-sex desiring Trinbagonians and the aesthetic narratives of the artists I’ve chosen each contribute to fleshing out the interrelationships among the political, the spiritual and the sensual for queer Trinbagonian subjects.
1 For the purposes of this analysis, ‘the political’ describes both official and unofficial power hierarchies, ‘the spiritual’ describes a concern with metaphysics and ‘the sensual’ describes both sexual and non-sexual intimacy.
2 The term “Trinbagonian” is a commonly used adjectival referent for the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, an archipelagic nation-state named for its two principal islands.