“The map of skin and the skin of maps”: queer Caribbean writing and the corporeality of topography

In this article, I provide further creative and critical contexts for Nadia Salgado’s notion of corporeal consciousness. Exploring the body-place trope, I ask what orientations of corporeal consciousness emerge from queer Hispanic Caribbean writing in its interanimation with topos-politics. I argue that queer Caribbean writing presents a critically generative engagement with the land-body trope, an intervention enriched by its peculiar historical positionality, for the queer body is more likely to suffer alienation from the Caribbean topos on account of sex, as well as multiple layers of othering akin to the type initially mapped onto the Caribbean lands in the colonial imaginary but creatively and variously reimagined by queer Caribbean writers. I demonstrate this by close-reading works by Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Emanuel Xavier, Rane Arroyo, Reinaldo Arenas and Achy Obejas, synthesizing four orientations of the body-topos trope. The significance of this intervention is that it offers tentative coherence to the mesh of thoughts on embodiment and place in Hispanic Caribbean discourse, and documents the value, texture and legacies of a queer meditation on the trope. By mesh of thoughts, I mean the various interlocking individual interventions that the selected texts are making regarding the question of place and body.