(Neo) Colonial Formations of Blackness, Queerness and National Identity In Jamaica

In this presentation, Webster McDonald (postdoctoral fellow, SLIPPAGE LAB Northwestern University) asks, how might we envision the contours of freedom beyond the constraints of colonial modernity as a critical decolonial project? At the core of this discussion is what McDonald describes as a panoptic omni-visionary effect, where the systematic reappropriation of the colonial episteme (religious doctrines, the neoliberal management of behavior, cultural intelligibility…) creates a self-regulating system that polices non-normative gender and sexual expressions–placing its “SUBJECTS” in zones of abandonment and “non-being.” Within a Jamaican context, McDonald contends that the Buggery Act of 1533, remains entrenched in Jamaican legal and extra-legal structures, reinforcing the heterosexualization and masculinization of citizenship.