Repair if by Relation

Zaira Simone-Thompson • Wesleyan University

December 2nd @ 6pm • Daniel Family Commons

In this lecture, Zaira Simone-Thompson offers an analysis of relationality that neither scholarship nor policies pertaining to reparations have explored. Drawing on Glissant’s decolonial poetics as well as Caribbean Feminist politics and Black Geographic thought, she argues that the Caribbean’s reparative project can no longer survive through partitions that deny the social and material proximities of slavery, indentureship, and native genocide. To grasp a reparative future for the Caribbean involves juxtaposing representations and moments that, on the surface, might seem estranged but are intimately connected, as expressed in the discourse on “coolitude” (Carter, Torabully 2002), social justice networks, and practices of mourning. The paper presents a framework of what Simone-Thompson calls relational repair, focusing on two moments: the 2023 Caribbean Equality Project’s Queeribean Crossings Conference in New York City and a heritage tour to Nelson Island--a former detention site for indentured laborers in Trinidad. She identifies both spatial projects not as models but rather openings to a relational repair. One strives for cross-racial solidarity against premature death in Caribbean LGBTQ communities, while the other seeks to redefine Indo-Caribbean spatial identities.

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