New Spaces, New Subjectivities: Gender, Caribbean Politics, and Black Diasporic Productions of Space

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Caribbean spaces in Canada produce and are produced by political subjects. Caribbean space (Boyce Davies, 2013) refers throughout to a relation of multiple places, practices, and movements across the territorial Caribbean and its diaspora that produces particular subjectivities. In conversation with the writings of Black feminist geographers and other decolonial thinkers, I examine the relationships, practices, representations, and political practices that recreate Caribbean life in Canada. This research is attentive to the social reproductive labour of these participants which transforms the conditions in which they live and enacts meaningful presence in their cities. Using archival work and oral history interviews with 22 Black women and gender non-conforming people, this research considers the homespaces, sites of civic friendship, and diasporic relations through which participants come to develop their political practices. Articulated here are political subjectivities that are not limited to what is typically recognized as activism. Rather, the interviewees demonstrate how care practices, the cultivation of friendship, and engagements with collective memory produce spatial knowledge and shape ways of doing political work. This dissertation argues for a way to think about how people transform urban space outside of the most legible forms of political participation and demonstrates the limits of looking for the political only in spectacular events and confrontations with state institutions. Though large-scale occupations appear across these interviews as critical events, they are not the most significant Caribbean and Black diasporic sites for the (re)production of political thought and practice. Thus, these conversations offer a way of thinking about the political that refuses nihilism and draws on history (both collective and personal) to imagine more just futures. These ways of being enable the people interviewed to navigate “new” political terrains and urban struggles in the diaspora that lead to the transformation of space.