Fractal Futures

The epilogue considers the implications of queer fractals for thinking about futurity. It revisits the first moment of modern globality: European conquest of the New World. It focuses on Diego Álvarez Chanca’s 1494 account of his visit to several Caribbean islands, the first written natural history and ethnography of the Americas. Chanca’s representations of Caribbean Indigenous gender and sexual relations as “beastly” inaugurates racialized discourses of deviancy that justify conquest in the nascent workings of transatlantic capital. A queer reading of this text unsettles discourses of progress that envision the future as a clean break with this past by moving with the recursive temporalities that characterize Caribbean and queer realities. It suggests that the future takes shape not through a linear departure from the past, but instead as a ruptural space of indeterminacy that accompanies patterns of history that seem to repeat.