The Cyrus Sylvester
Digital Archive
of Queer
Trinidad and Tobago

I am currently cataloguing a collection of approximately 5000 digital media for the creation of an online archive of Trinidad and Tobago’s queer history from the 1980s to present to document the creative ways that queer people envision ways of being within the Caribbean. This area of study has been gaining increased attention by several scholars who have positioned the region as a complicated space of endless queer possibilities. For example, David Murray’s (2012) work on Barbados has been foundational in examining the ways that the island’s queer sexual politics are influenced by local, regional and transnational discourses on sexuality and gender identity. Tanya Saunders (2016), in her theorization of Hip Hop Activism in Cuba and Brazil, argues that greater attention is needed to intraregional, interregional and transnational feminist cultural encounters to better understand Black lesbian, feminist and queer activism. Matthew Chin’s ethnographic work on Jamaica’s Gay Freedom Movement (1977-1984) also disrupts popular narratives of uninterrupted homophobia in Jamaica and considers how that country has historically and contemporarily been a site of political contestation for queer people.

This project adds to this growing body of work by curating an archive of Trinidad and Tobago’s queer community. I am collaborating with commuity leader Cyrus Sylvester who has been collecting various media for the last twenty-five years. I am also working with the administrators of the Caribbean Homophobias multimedia digital project, who have already provided access to materials, and are interested in providing space on their platform to build a digital archive for this project. In this project I centre the importance of acknowledging the long legacies of queer resistance and community making in the Caribbean, and interrogate how this archive from Trinidad and Tobago affords opportunities to rethink queer possibilities within the region against the backdrop of homophobia, transphobia and discrimination. I ask:

1. What does it mean to trace a genealogy of queerness in Trinidad and Tobago that continues to be influenced by the postcolonial political and cultural climate within the region? 

2. How might Trinidad and Tobago be positioned as a site from which to historicize queer histories from a transnational perspective that is attentive to the flows of power between North America, Europe and the Caribbean? 

This project makes a timely intervention in the fields of sexuality studies, transnational feminism, transgender studies, and anthropology by focusing on the areas of queer sexual and gender politics in the Caribbean. It will also prove especially useful to academics, students and activists who are interested in exploring these themes across their various areas of specialization in these fields.

I will produce two major outputs:

• A special collection that catalogues and digitizes archival material obtained from Trinidad and Tobago. 

• A photo essay that explores themes emerging from the archive.

Please feel free to contact me for more information and updates.