Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean (New World Studies) - Hardcover

Faith Smith (editor)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0813931126 ISBN 13: 9780813931128

Publisher: University of Virginia Press, 2011

Synopsis

This is a multidisciplinary collection of essays that draws on current anxieties about ‘legitimate’ sexual identities and practices across the Caribbean to explore both the impact of globalization and the legacy of the region’s history of sexual exploitation. It questions prevailing oppositions between the backward, homophobic nation-state and the laid-back, service-with-a-smile paradise or between giving in to the autocratic demands of the global north and equating postcolonial sovereignty with a “wholesome” heterosexual citizenry.

About this title

Review:

Sex and the Citizen is an extremely important contribution to the fields of Caribbean studies and gender/sexuality studies. While there has been quite a lot of work on gender in Caribbean studies, attention to sexuality has been more recent, in part because of the imposed silences upon transgressive sexualities that disturb nationalist renderings of postcolonial Caribbean societies. Tackling this topic from a range of disciplinary sites including law, cultural studies, and sociology as well as literary theory, Sex and the Citizen offers critical and original perspectives. People are hungry for this sort of analysis, and it is a much-needed critical intervention both in terms of work on nationalism in the Caribbean and in terms of sexuality studies.

--Deborah Thomas, University of Pennsylvania, author of Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica

About the Author:

Faith Smith is Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English and American Literature at Brandeis University.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0813931126
• ISBN 13: 9780813931128
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 336