In Fractal Repair, Matthew Chin investigates queerness in Jamaica from early colonial occupation to the present, critically responding to the island’s global reputation for extreme homophobia and anti-queer violence. Chin advances a theory and method of queer fractals to bring together genealogies of queer and Caribbean formation. Fractals—a kind of geometry in which patterns repeat but never exactly in the same way—make visible shifting accounts of Caribbean queerness in terms of race, gender, and sexual alterity. Drawing on this fractal orientation, Chin assembles and analyzes multigenre archives, ranging from mid-twentieth-century social science studies of the Caribbean to Jamaica’s National Dance Theatre Company to HIV/AIDS organizations, to write reparative histories of queerness. Chin’s proposal of a fractal politics of repair invests in the horizon of difference that repetition materializes, and it extends reparations discourses intent on overcoming the past and calculating economic compensation for survivors of violence.
 

Matthew Chin is Assistant Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Virginia.

Acknowledgments  vii
Introduction. Queer Fractals: Making Histories of Repair  1
1. Queer Jamaica 1494–1998  21
Part I. Archival Continuities
2. Knowledge: A “Native” Social Science  39
3. The Body: Responding to HIV/AIDS  63
Part II. Narrative Ruptures
4. Performance: The National Dance Theatre Company  93
5. Politics: The Gay Freedom Movement  119
Epilogue. Fractal Futures  153
Notes  159
Bibliography  197
Index  223