ABSTRACT
This chapter broadens the intersectional scope of the book beyond heterosexual narratives of migration and settling, which contain a number of assumptions about how domestic homes are arranged and what they signify that become complicated when we consider narratives of queer migration. Homes are frequently seen as negative spaces in queer narratives, such that the process of “coming out” is typically preceded by “moving out”. In the case of queer diasporic narratives, this trajectory can become transposed into one in which the home nation/culture is disavowed in favor of the openness afforded by the Western metropolis. Such trajectories can have the effect of reproducing imperial narratives of “progress” that render the West as more enlightened than “backward” cultures where there is less sexual freedom. However, Bernardine Evaristo’s novel Mr Loverman takes a different approach, placing a story of sexual liberation in the context of a longer history of black struggle to achieve economic and ontological security. Such narrative choices complicate any straightforward reading of the novel as a critique of homophobia in Caribbean and Caribbean diasporic culture. Against a backdrop of other queer diasporic texts and “Windrush novels”, the chapter demonstrates how Mr Loverman is about queering home rather than any simple rejection of it. In doing so, it explores broader theoretical questions about the fractures and intersections between “queer” and “diaspora”, especially with regard to issues of placement and mobility, arguing that we need to leave space for the terms to be mutually interrogative rather than additive. Furthermore, as Mr Loverman is a novel that rewrites the first generation of “Windrush” arrivals to the UK, this final chapter also allows for a reflection on where this book began, and thus sets up its concluding remarks.
