Matthew ChinAssistant Professor- WGSS

Matthew Chin is a socio-cultural anthropologist that constructs grammars of criticism through feminist and queer histories of race to confront contemporary problem spaces at the intersection of geographies and fields.

 

His first book Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2024) intervenes at the nexus of Caribbean Studies and Queer Studies. This project considers how gender and sexuality play into demands for reparations for colonization, genocide, enslavement and indentureship across the Caribbean and the Global South. It draws on archival research, ethnography, literature and performance to focus on Jamaica given the ways that colonial epistemologies of race construct the island as exemplary of Caribbean homophobic exceptionalism. The book turns to fractals – or patterns that repeat but never exactly in the same way – to write histories that repair imperial violences around race, gender, and sexuality. Fractal Repair received the John Boswell Prize of the LGBTQ+ History Association, a Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award and an honorable mention for the Gordon K. and Sybil Lewis Book Award of the Caribbean Studies Association.

 

Part of Chin’s research involves examining the efforts of Jamaica’s Gay Freedom Movement (GFM), the first self-proclaimed gay activist organization in the Anglophone Caribbean that existed between 1977-1984. Building on the earlier work of the Caribbean International Resource Network, he has helped to construct a digital archive of GFM materials that is now available on the Digital Library of the Caribbean.

 

His second project considers the forms of knowledge that emerge from the relationship between the material and imaginative iterations of Asia and the Caribbean. In so doing, it brings Asian Studies and Caribbean Studies into closer dialogue and offers a way to think about rising anxieties around the increase in Asian – especially Chinese - economic and political incursion into the Caribbean. Through a series of feminist meditations on whaling, botanical gardens, cloth, and cuisine, this project traces the racialized mappings and counter-mappings that connect (East, West, South, and South-East) Asia to the (Dutch, English, French and Spanish) speaking Caribbean. By surfacing these connections that stretch across the Atlantic and Pacific, this study elucidates inter-imperial dynamics of race across regions of the Global South.

 

Chin’s work has been published in Public Culture, Interventions, Globalizations, Small Axe, and Journal of Homosexuality. His research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and supported by fellowships in the Department of Sociology at Columbia University, the Institute of Chinese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the Center for Sexuality, Race, and Gender Justice at the University of Kent, and the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies.