Alterity, Recognition and Performance: The Queer and the Animal in Makeda Silvera’s “Caribbean Chameleon”
Abstract This article explores notions of performativity in the story “Caribbean Chameleon,” published in Makeda Silvera’s collection Her Head a Village (1994). The story emphasises problems of performing with regards to the categories of race and gender as they pertain to the lived experience of Anglo-Caribbean migrants in Canada, a country which, in spite of its ostensible positive engagement with difference, is nevertheless still systemically hostile to migrants. Being able to adequately “perform” race or gender in a non-threatening way for the system becomes imperative for migrants, which the story highlights framing its critique of racial profiling within the conventions of the stage. This opens the door to examining the types of performativity with which “Caribbean Chameleon” engages. In this article, I discuss how notions of performance, performing and performativity interact with representations of queerness and animality, which provide and constitute modes of alterity that intersect with questions of race, gender, and (un)belonging that are raised in the story.
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Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel. Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Foundations. Temple UP, 2010.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005.
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Silvera, Makeda. Her Head a Village & Other Stories. Press Gang Publishers, 1994.
Silvera, Makeda. “Man Royals and Sodomites: Some Thoughts on the Invisibility of Afro-Caribbean Lesbians.” Feminist Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 1992, pp. 521-532.
Silvera, Makeda. Silenced: Makeda Silvera Talks with Working-Class West Indian Women about their Lives and Struggles as Domestic Workers in Canada. Sister Vision P, 1989.
Smedley, Audrey and Brian D. Smedley. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Westview P, 2012.
Stanescu, James. “Species Trouble: Judith Butler, Mourning, and the Precarious Lives of Animals.” Hypatia, vol. 27, no. 3, 2012, pp. 567-582.
Wing, Betsy. “Translator’s Introduction.” Poetics of Relation, by Édouard Glissant, translated by Betsy Wing, U of Michigan P, 1997, pp. xi-xx.
Augé, Marc. Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity. Translated by John Howe. Verso, 1995.
Beushausen, Wiebke. “Sexual Citizenship and Vulnerable Bodies in Makeda Silvera’s The Heart Does Not Bend and Joan Riley’s The Unbelonging.” Meridians, vol. 13, no. 2, 2016, pp. 56-78.
Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. Routledge, 1994.
Boisseron, Bénédicte. Afro-Dog: Blackness and the Animal Question. Columbia UP, 2018.
Braidotti, Rosi. “Mothers, Monsters, and Machines.” Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, edited by Katie Conboy, Nadie Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. Columbia UP, 1997.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1999.
Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory.” Theatre Journal, vol. 40, no. 4, 1988, pp. 519-531.
Capote, Truman. Music for Chameleons. Vintage International, 2012.
Chanady, Amaryll. “From Difference to Exclusion: Multiculturalism and Postcolonialism.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 8, no. 3, 1995, pp. 419-437.
Chariandy, David. “‘The Fiction of Belonging’: On Second-Generation Black Writing in Canada.” Callaloo, vol. 30, no. 3, 2007, pp. 818-829.
Charles, Christopher A.D. “Representations of Homosexuality in Jamaica.” Social and Economic Studies, vol. 60, no. 1, 2011, pp. 3-29.
Chen, Mel Y. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Duke UP, 2012.
Cummings, Ronald. “Jamaican Female Masculinities: Nanny of the Maroons and the Genealogy of the Man-Royal.” Journal of West Indian Literature, vol. 21, no. 1/2, 2012/2013, pp. 129-154.
Davis, Andrea. “Diaspora, Citizenship and Challenging the Myth of the Nation.” Canadian Woman Studies/Les cahiers de la femme, vol. 3, no. 2, 2004, pp. 64-69.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal that Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills. Fordham UP, 2008.
DuBois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Edited with an introduction and notes by Brent Hayes Edwards. Oxford UP, 2007.
Fielder, Brigitte Nicole. “Animal Humanism: Race, Species, and Affective Kinship in Nineteenth-Century Abolitionism.” American Quarterly, vol. 65, no. 3, 2013, pp. 487-514.
Fraile-Marcos, Ana María. “The Protean Myth of Canadian (Literary) Identity: Makeda Silvera’s Her Head a Village.” Open Letter, vol. 13, no. 2, 2007, pp. 72-86.
Fumagalli, Maria Cristina, Bénédicte Ledent, and Roberto del Valle Alcalá. “Introduction.” In The Cross-Dressed Caribbean: Writing, Politics, Sexualities, edited by Maria Cristina Fumagalli, Bénédicte Ledent, and Roberto del Valle Alcalá, U of Virginia P, 2013, pp. 1-21.
Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of Relation. Translated by Betsy Wing, U of Michigan P, 1997.
Haraway, Donna. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm P, 2003.
Hutcheon, Linda and Marion Richmond, editors. Other Solitudes: Canadian Multicultural Fiction. HarperCollins, 1990.
Kosofsky Sedgwick, Eve. Epistemology of the Closet. U of West Indies P, 2003.
Lamont, Corey. “Bangarang at the Border: Surveillance and the ‘Suspicious’ (Im)migrant Body in Makeda Silvera’s ‘Caribbean Chameleon.’” CLA Journal, vol. 56, no. 4, 2013, pp. 320-343.
Lott, Tommy L. The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation. Wiley-Blackwell, 1999.
Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime and the Making of Modern Urban America. Harvard UP, 2010.
Murrell, Nathaniel Samuel. Afro-Caribbean Religions: An Introduction to their Historical, Cultural, and Sacred Foundations. Temple UP, 2010.
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005.
Pollard, Velma. Dread Talk: The Language of Rastafari. Kingston Canoe P, 2003.
Roy, Patricia E. “The Fifth Force: Multiculturalism and the English Canadian Identity.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political Science, vol. 538, 1995, pp. 199-209.
Silvera, Makeda. Her Head a Village & Other Stories. Press Gang Publishers, 1994.
Silvera, Makeda. “Man Royals and Sodomites: Some Thoughts on the Invisibility of Afro-Caribbean Lesbians.” Feminist Studies, vol. 18, no. 3, 1992, pp. 521-532.
Silvera, Makeda. Silenced: Makeda Silvera Talks with Working-Class West Indian Women about their Lives and Struggles as Domestic Workers in Canada. Sister Vision P, 1989.
Smedley, Audrey and Brian D. Smedley. Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview. Westview P, 2012.
Stanescu, James. “Species Trouble: Judith Butler, Mourning, and the Precarious Lives of Animals.” Hypatia, vol. 27, no. 3, 2012, pp. 567-582.
Wing, Betsy. “Translator’s Introduction.” Poetics of Relation, by Édouard Glissant, translated by Betsy Wing, U of Michigan P, 1997, pp. xi-xx.
Cuadrado-Payeras, L. M. (2022). Alterity, Recognition and Performance: The Queer and the Animal in Makeda Silvera’s “Caribbean Chameleon”. Canada and Beyond: A Journal of Canadian Literary and Cultural Studies, 10, 115–133. https://doi.org/10.14201/candb.v10i115-133
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