Fractal Repair

“In Fractal Repair, Matthew Chin contributes significantly to our understanding of the history and the present of queer Jamaican life. Chin fills in the gaps on queer organizing in Jamaica, making use of the archive to piece together a different account of queer Jamaica than usually circulates. It is a lively read, deeply thoughtful, and does what it means to do: repair our understanding of queer Jamaican life and politics.” - Rinaldo Walcott, author of The Long Emancipation: Moving toward Black Freedom

“Matthew Chin’s Fractal Repair is an original and deeply compelling account of five hundred years of Jamaican intimacies. The fractal is a powerful organizing principle for the argument being made here, in which Chin shows how the colony has been central to the imperial rationalization of who counts as fully human and which intimacies are deemed to be socially valid. Archivally innovative, methodologically heterogeneous, and beautifully written, this book will make an important intervention.” - Faith Smith, author of Strolling in the Ruins: The Caribbean’s Non-sovereign Modern in the Early Twentieth Century

"Fractal Repair provides a timely interventionist history of Jamaica through a Queer framework and expands scholarship on how we can understand the nation as a sociopolitical space informed by those who are deemed worthy of belonging." - Jamella N. Gow, Ethnic and Racial Studies

"Chin... employs a provocative, theoretical framework grounded in mathematics, in particular fractal geometry, a field concerned with identifying repeating patterns that occur at irregular intervals. This unique historical approach allows Chin to untangle historical constructs of queerness, as well as expose colonial legacies that have shaped normative concepts of sexuality and gender in Jamaica. . . . Highly recommended. General readers through faculty; professionals." - F. H. Smith, Choice

"Through its interdisciplinary analysis, Fractal Repair makes vital contributions to Caribbean studies and queer studies." - Wigbertson Julian Isenia, Journal of the History of Sexuality

"[Fractal Repair] contribute[s] to the evolving study of sexuality and gender in the region, helping revise our understanding of the queer Caribbean." - Keith E. McNeal, New West Indian Guide

"This work is particularly significant for queer studies, Black studies, Caribbean history, performance studies, and postcolonial studies. . . . Fractal Repair offers an innovative approach to understanding Jamaica’s queer history, providing scholars with a new lens to explore the recursive, often unseen dynamics of power that continue to shape the lives of queer individuals in postcolonial contexts." - Webster McDonald, Caribbean Studies

“Chin is attentive to the fragmentary and recursive moments and moments of queerness that sometimes rupture. . . . Fractal Repair ultimately demonstrates that within these spaces of rupture, a queer history of Jamaica is anything but broken.”

"Like the method it offers, Fractal Repair reproduces the knowledge created in the past while presenting us with new possibilities." - Alejandro Beas-Murillo, Lateral