Queer Fractals

Abstract

This chapter situates history making as a way of redressing contemporary queer violence in Jamaica. In so doing, it considers how mathematics shapes historical thought as a mode of representation and suggests displacing the dominance of arithmetic in practices of history making. It centers Jamaica in the history of modern mathematics that served colonial projects to regulate race, gender, and sexual relations on both sides of the Atlantic. The chapter contends that turning to geometry facilitates a different kind of approach to historical inquiry and uses geometry to think about the relationship between how the fields of Caribbean Studies and Queer Studies practice history making. It proposes fractal geometry as a fitting mode of representation for constructing Caribbean histories of queerness, introduces queer fractals as a theory and method of reparative history making, and considers the implications of queer fractals for debates about the politics of reparations.