Editorial: Imperial Entanglements and Archival Desires

What does it mean to look for queerness in colonial, anticolonial and postcolonial archives? What can these archives tell us about formations of queer desire and sexual politics across times and places? And what can queerness tell us, in turn, about colonial domination, struggles for decolonization and the configuration of postcolonial societies? Equally important, what investments come to shape our work when a search for queerness orients our mining of colonial, anticolonial and postcolonial archives? The essays collected in this special issue offer some answers to these questions by discussing the place of sexual politics in the colonial and postcolonial relations between the Netherlands and the Caribbean. In order to do so, they draw on postcolonial studies, cultural studies, feminist and queer theories as well as current debates on the archive taking place across these fields.