Willis, KedonKedonWillis2025-12-012025-12-012025978-3-98989-055-8https://fis.uni-bamberg.de/handle/uniba/111811Queer writers from the Caribbean in recent years have reconceptualized queer theory as a potent form of anticolonial critique. This paper examines how Jamaican writer Marlon James, in his 2016 novel The Brief History of Seven Killings, deconstructs cultural artefacts such as sayings and folk songs to (1) unearth their forgotten or overlooked anticolonial registers and (2) reconstitute them as vehicles for postcolonial utopian thinking. James, I argue, moves away from tropes that emphasize queer stigmatization as a discrete social problem and more broadly attends to the contemporary transnational maneuvers on trade, the environment and foreign policy that continue to undermine the sovereign agency of postcolonial nations like Jamaica. James does, however, offer glimpses of hope through the enlightening potential of music, film, and language, as well as through fleeting moments of samesex intimacy scattered throughout the novel. These moments, I argue, collude to ask the reader to consider the transgressive alliances necessary for imagining the future destabilization of Euro-American colonial logics still operating within the framework of neoliberal capitalism.engJamaicaMarlon Jamesqueer theoryutopiapostcolonialism810bookpart