Coconut/cane & cutlass: Queer visuality in the indo-caribbean lesbian archive

Abstract

This article returns to Coconut I Cane & Cutlass nearly three decades after its release to examine the radical ways in which Mohabeers visual aesthetics posits the canescape as a site of Indo-Caribbean lesbian subjectivity, reconfigures the cutlass from its status of violence to one of desire, and examines the poetics of fragmentation as a queer feminist genealogical approach. In our reading of Coconut/Cane & Cutlass as a visual text of rewriting diasporic subjectivity, Mohabeer produces a radical visual genealogy that narrates diasporic Indo-Caribbean identity through a primary site of queerness, upending historical approaches to gender and sexuality within traditional configurations of the indentured diasporas.