Queerly Gendered Poetics and Life Genres: Cities from Below

How we understand the historical processes by which contemporary cities become internationally networked and imperialized can be informed by Walcott’s taking up of Sylvia Wynter’s ‘archipelagos of poverty’. According to Wynter, ‘archipelagos of poverty’ refer to a global system by which ‘city ghettos’ of the metropoles are organized via the same ruling relations that organize shanty towns, favellas and maroons. Under racial capitalism, the two kinds of urban geographies co-develop in relation to one another and are productive of queerly gendered archipelagos of racialized poverty. In an era of finance racial capitalism, we can thus speak of so-termed ‘global cities’, such as Toronto, as producing both wealth for a global elite as well as archipelagos of queerly gendered and racialized poverty. In this presentation, I will reflect on Rinaldo Walcott’s ‘city essays’, where he extends Edouard Glissant’s ‘poetics of relation’ to ‘homopoetics of relation’, to understand how imperialized global cities are also productive of queerly gendered ‘life in relation’.