Education:

PhD Social Work & Anthropology, University of Michigan

MSW University of Michigan

MA Anthropology University of Michigan

Hon. BA International Development Studies & Anthropology University of Toronto Scarborough

Field and Specialties:

Anthropology, History, Caribbean Studies, Asian Studies, Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, Feminist & Queer Studies

Matthew Chin is an anthropologist who carries out feminist and queer histories of race to construct grammars of criticism to address contemporary problem spaces at the intersections of geographies and fields.

My first book Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica (2024, Duke University Press) intervenes at the nexus of Caribbean Studies and Queer Studies. Fractal Repair is a recipient of a Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award. This project engages in history making to consider how gender and sexuality plays into demands for reparations for colonization, genocide, enslavement and indentureship across the Caribbean that largely focus on race and indigeneity. Fractal Repair focuses on Jamaica because of the way colonial epistemologies of race construct the island to be exemplarly of Caribbean homophobic exceptionalism. I suggest that turns to fractals – or patterns that repeat but never exactly in the same way – are useful in writing histories that repair imperial violences of race, gender and sex.

Part of this project involved examining the efforts of Jamaica’s Gay Freedom Movement (GFM), the first self-proclaimed gay activist organization in the Anglophone Caribbean that existed between 1977-1984. Building on the earlier work of the Caribbean International Resource Network, I helped to construct a digital archive of GFM materials that is now available on the Digital Library of the Caribbean. I also coordinated an online event to launch the digitization of entire corpus of GFM’s newsletter the Jamaica Gaily News that included a panel of former GFM members.

My second project tentatively titled "Imperial Desires: Asian Caribbean Histories" engages the fields of Caribbean Studies and Asian Studies. It wagers on the capacity of history making to surface the way that gender and sexuality play into contemporary racial anxieties around the increase in China’s political economic influence in the Caribbean. The project considers how the various desires of Spanish, British and US empire operate through the languages of race, gender and sex to constitute Asia and the Caribbean as discrete geographies and incorporate them into imperial designs. Imperial Desires asks how feminist and queer histories elucidate dynamics of race and empire across regions of the Global South.

Selected Publications:

Chin, M. (2024) Fractal Repair: Queer Histories of Modern Jamaica. Durham: Duke University Press.

Chin, M. (2022). Queering Chinese Crossings in Late Twentieth Century Jamaica: Larry Chang and the Gay Freedom Movement. Interventions, 24 (8), 1309-1327. 

Chin, M. (2020). Antihomosexuality and Nationalist Critique in Late Colonial Jamaica: Revisiting the 1951 Police Enquiry. Small Axe, 24(3), 81-96. 

Chin, M. (2019). Tracing “gay liberation” through postindependence Jamaica. Public Culture, 31(2), 323-341.