Re-framing and fracturing Caribbean-Canadian diasporas through a self-reflexive lens

Abstract

This paper begins with an overview of the theorization of diasporic media by various scholars from Canada and the UK, and gestures to how the typology of diasporic media charted by Eugenia Siapera in her chapter ‘Minority and Diasporic Media’ elides an account of alternative diasporic media arts (independent film and video) produced by intersectional plural identities diasporic subjects/artists whose work unsettle relations to the heteronormative, raced and gendered constructions of the nation, nationality, migration. The second part of the article is written from Michelle’s perspective as a queer racialized Caribbean-Canadian diasporic artist, engages in a self-reflexive analysis of the fractured Indo-Caribbean diasporic identity and aesthetics represented in Coconut/Cane & Cutlass (Canada/Guyana, 1994) and Black female and queer subjectivities represented in Blu in You (Canada/Tobago, 2008).