Biography
Ryan Joyce is currently completing a PhD in French and Francophone Studies with specializations in francophone Caribbean literature, Haitian studies, and gender and sexuality studies at Tulane University. His dissertation, Maroon Utopias, Queer Utopias: Flights to Freedom in Circum-Caribbean Writing explores the utopian drive in 19th, 20th, and 21st-century francophone literature from Haiti, Louisiana, and the French Antilles, as it relates to the future-oriented community-building practices of runaway rebel slaves and modern queer subjects. His work has appeared in small axe, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, and The Black Scholar.
Research
My project analyzes the shared modes of resistance between runaway rebel slaves and modern queer subjects in 20th and 21st-century circum-Caribbean literature and culture. It contends that through their own struggles for freedom and equality, queer people in the region practice/d maroon tactics of flight, resistance, and belonging. My research corrects a dearth in previous scholarship by emphasizing marronage as a transnational and transhistorical phenomenon that attends to the shared queer histories and cultures of resistance across multiple bioregions, extending from the swamps of southern Louisiana to the urban districts of downtown Port-au-Prince. As an investigation into forms of marronage in the region, my project questions the long-standing omission of queer men and women from the narrative of contemporary maroon resistance. Through archival research on contemporary writers and LGBTQ social activists and literary analyses of circum-Caribbean texts, I argue for a re-centering of queerness within historical and anthropological scholarship to map a queer cultural history of the region.
My analysis of creative fictional works that feature marronage will be set into dialogue with records found within special collections and archives on Louisiana, Haitian, and French West Indian history and culture. To this end, I will spend several weeks researching the history of maroon resistance and queer marronage at archives in New York, at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and in New Orleans, at the Louisiana Research Collection in the their newly curated archive on LGBTQ history and culture of Louisiana and the Gulf South.
