Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Bénédicte Ledent, and Roberto del Valle Alcalá, eds. The Cross-Dressed Caribbean: Writing, Politics, Sexualities (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013); 319 pages; ISBN: 9780813935232 (paperback).

Kofi Omoniyi Sylvanus Campbell. The Queer Caribbean Speaks: Interviews with Writers, Artists, and Activists (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); 209 pages; ISBN: 9781137364838 (hardcover).

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More examinations of gender and sexuality are slowly but steadily emerging in the field of Caribbean studies, and collections on these topics promote a multiplicity of voices and views. Both The Cross-Dressed Caribbean: Writing, Politics, Sexualities, edited by Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Bénédicte Ledent, and Roberto del Valle Alcalá, and The Queer Caribbean Speaks: Interviews with Writers, Artists, and Activists by Kofi Omoniyi Sylvanus Campbell are collections that allow for the maintenance of difference within the unity of a general theme.

In The Cross-Dressed Caribbean, part of the New World Studies series edited by J. Michael Dash, Frank Moya Pons, and Sandra Pouchet Paquet, the editors bring together writers from across the globe to discuss the trope of transvestism in Caribbean texts. Contributors include Paula K. Sato, Carine M. Mardorossian, Chantal Zabus, Michael Niblett, Kerstin Oloff, Wendy Knepper, and Roberto Strongman. This anthology is marked by its transversals in terms of language and genre, which is evidence of the writers’ willingness to actually practice the kinds of crossings present in the texts they examine. The easy intermingling of Hispanophone texts with those of other languages is particularly welcome, as this is not often found in Caribbean theoretical texts. Also appreciated is the inclusion of theater (in Karina Smith’s thoughtful discussion of the Sistren Theatre Collective) and autobiography (in del Valle Alcalá’s adventurous interpretation of Reinaldo Arena’s Antes que Anochezca, or Before Night Falls). Lizabeth Paravisini, for example, not only reads Dominican writer José Alcántara Almanzar against Derek Walcott and Jamaica Kincaid, she also examines the mixed-media art of Jamaican Ebony Patterson in her articulation of both bedrooms and Jamaican dancehalls as sites of cross-dressing and subversion.

The Queer Caribbean Speaks, part of the New Caribbean Studies series edited by Campbell and Shalini Puri, brings together interviews with activists and writers to discuss the LGBT experience in both the Anglophone Caribbean and its diaspora, including Thomas Glave, Helen Klonaris, H. Nigel Thomas, Erin Greene, Faizal Deen Forrester, and Joel Simpson. His aim to give voice to this lived experience is reflected in the space he offers to identifying and differentiating the large number of LGBT-rights organizations (and their dizzying array of acronyms) across the region, as well as his refusal to standardize his interviewees’ language.

There is discussion of explosive violence against the LGBT community in the Caribbean, like the murder of seventeen-year-old Jamaican trans youth Dwayne Jones in 2013, but the subjects also relate smaller injustices that slowly wear away at one’s being. Ryon Rawlins, the founder of the Youth Wing of SASOD (the Society Against Sexual Orientation Discrimination) in Guyana, is often unable to travel from Comfort and Hope to Georgetown because of homophobic boat operators. Korey Anthony Chisholm, former winner of the Miss Gay Guyana Glory Pageant and current youth activist, says that when he coughs or sneezes, people automatically assume he has AIDS.

The brief interview with Mista Majah P is particularly powerful. In reaction to the “murder music” of the Jamaican dancehall, this reggae artist released an entire pro-LGBT album. Despite the real possibility of retribution, he takes the opportunity to call out homophobic musicians: “I DARE THEM TO COME AND DEBATE WITH ME—I AM CALLING OUT BEENIE MAN CAPLETON SIZZLA ELEPHANT VYBZ KARTEL BOUNTY KILLER SPRAZZA BENZ and all of the other [sic] who have this homophobic stance” (149). This all-caps challenge provides a level of immediacy to this collection; what is written here matters and has real-world implications.

Both Fumagalli et al. and Campbell include Jamaican science-fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson and Trinidadian-Canadian writer Shani Mootoo. In Mootoo’s essay in Cross-Dressed, “On Becoming an Indian Starboy,” previously published in Canadian Literature, she discusses her exuberant identification with the starboy character in Indian films. She imagines the object of her affection “noting my bloodied forehead, admiring my cream-colored scarf, my tall cowboy boots, and accepting me fully for all that I was and was not” (169). It is the juxtaposition of Mootoo’s cheerful imaginings with her childhood experience, as related in her Campbell interview, of being made to wear girlish heels and slips, all the while admiring her brother’s khakis, all the more distressing.

Cross-Dressed includes writings both by and about certain writers, like Odile Ferly’s examination of Mayra Santos Febres’s Sirena Selena vestida de pena (published in English as Sirena Selena), along with an essay by Santos Febres herself, a decision which offers the reader multiple points of engagement with writers and their texts. The seamless collaboration of Lee Easton and Kelly Hewson on Lawrence Scott’s novel Aelred’s Sin provides a helpful context in terms of religion and transvestism against which to read Scott’s “Tales Told under the San Fernando Hill,” a moving revelation of transgression and desire in the context of confession and the church, included later in the collection.

Similarly, Campbell’s decision to release from form is rewarded in the back-to-back chapters on Jamaican writer Patricia Powell. In response to Campbell’s question in the first chapter about the influence of her queerness on her writing, she includes a previously unpublished paper answering this question at length, “A Search for Caribbean Masculinities,” which comprises the second. This essay provided the space for her rhapsodic riff on healing possibilities for history based around re-balancing the masculine with the feminine. She imagines an alternate history to the Atlantic slave trade: “What if on those ships leaving the gold coast of Africa there was no one shackled on board…What if the people weren’t naked at all, the flesh torn up already from lashes, but they were covered instead in printed fabrics so colorful and bright they filled the ships with cheer…What if…?” (118-119). This wandering speculation would not have been possible had Campbell stuck too closely with his interview format.

One questionable editorial decision in Cross-Dressed is the inclusion of its final chapter, Isabel Hoving’s discussion of Dutchophone texts. Her essay is a bold experiment with a cross-dressed reading of Surinamese writer Cándani’s 2002 novel Huis van as (House of Ashes), a text without a trans character per se. She herself admits that there are but few examples of these characters in Dutchophone Caribbean literature, so the decision to deal with a whole linguistic group within one last chapter may be an overextended attempt at inclusion that perhaps should be addressed within another anthology.

In Queer, one of the limitations of Campbell’s work is his sometimes-leading questions. He writes in his introduction that “no single universal theory can explain” sexual identities (7). Given his own recognition of the different ways sexuality functions in the Caribbean than in the Global North, it is curious that he insists on asking certain questions, like what it was like to grow up “queer” in the Caribbean. A number of interviewees point out that they did not grow up “queer,” either because they did not articulate their sexual difference until later in life or because they simply do not agree with the term. Rosamond S. King, specifically, attaches a note to her emailed response to the interview: “I’m not sure about your use of the term queer” (153). (To Campbell’s credit, not only does he include this note at the beginning of his interview with King, but he highlights it within his introduction.) Had Campbell given his subjects more space to define for themselves the terms of their inclusion within this work rather than pronouncing all definitively as “queer,” some of the subjects would have been able to spend less time on the defense and more time representing and articulating their own experiences.

Campbell’s persistent reference to Rosamund Elwin’s anthology, Tongues on Fire: Caribbean Lesbian Lives and Stories, soon becomes overwhelming. In Powell’s interview, for instance, he references this text no fewer than five times. The decision to repeatedly cite one particular text, specifically about the lives of Caribbean lesbians, seems like a missed opportunity to include other texts (perhaps by contributors themselves) that are available. (This is less of a problem in Cross-Dressed; though many contributors cite Glissant and Garber, these references, tucked away in endnotes, are much less intrusive.)

Additionally, the stand-alone nature of each interview, without any kind of thematic organization, draws attention to the only decision, beyond that of its inclusion in the first place, that remains: the order of the interviews. The first four chapters are all interviews with men; in a book that proclaims sensitivity to issues of gender, one may wonder why no woman’s voice is heard in the first hundred pages.

Overall, both works are valuable additions to the field of Caribbean gender and sexuality studies. Each book, in its own way, is optimistic. The Cross-Dressed Caribbean shows us the possibilities of using cross-dressing as a lens through which to read texts that feels both fresh and appropriate to the region, and The Queer Caribbean Speaks provides the perspectives of the artists and activists who are shaping the future of the Caribbean. As Campbell points out, “It is only through knowledge that the power required for change can grow” (12), and these works together are a step in the right direction.

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Suzanne Uzzilia is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City and an adjunct lecturer in English at LaGuardia Community College, CUNY, in Queens, New York. Her dissertation research examines contemporary Caribbean women’s writing.