Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean ed. by Faith Smith (review)

Sex and the Citizen is a collection of essays that explores the complex interconnections between sexuality and citizenship throughout the Caribbean. Divided into four discrete sections with three to five pieces each, the collection is a mixture of literary analyses, histories, anthropologic and ethnographic works, as well as creative pieces. Each section is replete with critiques, analyses, and studies of the making of citizenship within the Caribbean through the purview of sexuality. Creative works play an equally important role as they highlight arguments developed throughout the collection as well as construct their own perspectives and strategies for approaching sexuality and citizenship. Editor Faith Smith’s structuring of sections, articles, and creative works form multivalent discussions. Sex and the Citizen is an exciting work for scholars of the Caribbean, African, and South Asian Diaspora, and US/Caribbean relations, as well as for scholars interested in feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories.

Rather than provide a glimpse into each article individually, I call attention to articles which exemplify Smith’s overarching hermeneutic, specifically that “Caribbean discourses of sexuality constitute a still understudied topic that can be illuminated by regional, local, diasporic, and multidisciplinary lenses and also, crucially, that these discourses mark a paradigmatic shift in the way the Caribbean is demonstrating itself and to the world what it means to live in and with the present moment of globalization” (1). This is not to suggest that certain articles deserve greater attention than others, but more so to acknowledge articles which promote each section’s centralized thematic and articulate Smith’s conceptualization of the collection as a whole. With that said, Smith’s introduction, subtitled “Sexing the Citizen,” wonderfully captures the collection’s various theoretical approaches and perspectives while simultaneously situating the impetus for the project at hand. Smith’s introduction exemplifies the collection’s high standard of scholarship and her introduction embraces each article’s contributions to understanding the multi-sexed Caribbean citizen.

The first section, titled “Contemporary Package Deals,” explores the movement of sexuality as it crosses national/cultural borders and its relationship with globalization. In “Nobody Ent Billing Me,” Carmen Gillespie underscores what she terms the “musical exchange” between African American blues singer Peggy Scott-Adams’s song “Bill”—a song “about a woman’s discovery of her husband’s homosexuality” (39)—and the Barbadian group Red Plastic Bag’s musical response with their song “In De Tail.” Scott-Adams’s song found itself reimagined—“bill” eventually became a pejorative term directed towards male homosexuals in Barbados—as both a response to black American homosexuality as well as to Bill Clinton’s administration. “Musical exchange,” writes Gillespie, “exposed some of the extent tensions on the island with respect to the correlations between sexualities and national identity,” thus becoming a “tool” for Gillespie in navigating “the complicated narrative relationships between Barbados and the United States” (38). The section emphasizes exchange in terms of individual bodily exchange and monetary as Patricia Saunders reads American projections/expectations of Caribbean sexuality within Terry McMillan’s How Stella Got Her Groove Back, as well as McMillan’s own failed visions of Caribbean masculinity, and Donette Francis’s analysis of female sex workers in Angie Cruz’s Soledad. Saunders and Francis question the relationships and exchanges between Caribbean sexualities and globalization.

The second section, “Diasporic Citizenship,” begins with Rinaldo Walcott’s critique of black diaspora discourses through a queered lens. Opening with an assessment of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s essay “How to Bring Your Kids Up Gay,” Walcott troubles the dyad of “normal” and “proper” black bodies—heterosexual black bodies—by using Jamaica Kincaid’s The Mother and Hilton Als’s The Women to explore what he perceives as their lack of justification of homosexuality, thereby “making homosexuality an immediate given” (77). Walcott’s critique of “normal” and “proper” bodies mirrors Tejaswini Niranjana’s excellent history of Indian women in Trinidad prior to and during India’s call for independence, where women’s bodies became sites of prideful trans-Atlantic Indian identity...