Attentive to the disjunctures of the Chinese diaspora in the Americas, Patricia Powell’s “The Pagoda” intertextually re-territorializes the tropes of Asian American literature and cultural criticism in a Jamaican context in order to fashion a queer utopian historical romance. The novel portrays a simultaneously pluralist and creolizing anticolonial nationalism emerging from queer intimacies that cut across the racial divisions of late nineteenth-century Jamaica. Not only does this displace the masculinist labor movements of the 1930s as the originary moment of anticolonial Jamaican nationalism, but “The Pagoda” also offers a Caribbean alternative to US-based models of ethnic literature, limning distinctive histories of racialization, creolization, and pluralism.