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Andil Gosine
Harvard Book Store's virtual event series welcomes ANDIL GOSINE—professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University—for a discussion of his book Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean. He will be joined in conversation by FAITH SMITH, associate professor of African and African American Studies, English, and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Brandeis University and author of Sex and the Citizen: Interrogating the Caribbean.
In Nature's Wild, Andil Gosine engages with questions of humanism, queer theory, and animality to examine and revise understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean. Surveying colonial law, visual art practices, and contemporary activism, Gosine shows how the very concept of homosexuality in the Caribbean (and in the Americas more broadly) has been overdetermined by a colonially influenced human/animal divide.
Gosine refutes this presupposed binary and embraces animality through a series of case studies: a homoerotic game called puhngah, the institution of gender-based dress codes in Guyana, and efforts toward the decriminalization of sodomy in Trinidad and Tobago—including the work of famed activist Colin Robinson, paintings of human animality by Guadeloupean artist Kelly Sinnapah Mary, and Gosine's own artistic practice. In so doing, he troubles the ways in which individual and collective anxieties about “wild natures” have shaped the existence of Caribbean people while calling for a reassessment of what political liberation might look like.
