Professor Andil Gosine of York University’s Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (EUC) is hosting a virtual launch for his award-winning new book, Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Duke University Press), on Thursday, Sept. 23 at 4 p.m. via Zoom, in conjunction with the Art Gallery of Ontario exhibition Fragments of Epic Memory.
In Nature’s Wild, the Trinidad-born scholar-artist contends with his own animality. The story begins in his classroom at an all-boys Catholic high school in Trinidad, when a priest points to a row of boys and demands, “Prove to me that you are not homosexual.” From there, Gosine takes readers on a journey that mixes personal narrative with historical analysis of the ways in which anxieties about humans’ animality have produced various kinds of disciplinary strategies in law and culture. Gosine draws from historical and contemporary visual art representations, dress code regulations and recent legal challenges to the criminalization of sodomy, to argue for the embracing of one’s “wild nature.”
Gosine is a professor of environmental arts and justice at York University. He is also the curator of the exhibition Everything Slackens in a Wreck, which will open at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York next spring. The companion touring exhibition for his book Nature’s Wild will launch its three-year tour in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in January 2022.
Joining Gosine at the launch for a discussion about his new book are Richard Fung, Kamala Kempadoo and Jillian Ollivierre. Fung is a Trinidad-born, Toronto-based video artist, cultural critic and community activist, whose seminal and celebrated works include the films Sea in the Blood, My Mother’s Place and Dal Puri Diaspora. Kempadoo is a professor in the Department of Social Science at York University and director of the Graduate Program in Social and Political Thought. She teaches Caribbean studies, transnational feminisms, sex work studies, Black studies, and critical perspectives in gender and development, and is the author of Sexing the Caribbean. Ollivierre is a doctoral candidate in social anthropology at York University. Her interview essay on Gosine’s artistic practice, “After Indo-Caribbean: Interrogating Interstitial Identities and Diasporic Solidarties in Conversation with Andil Gosine,” is forthcoming in the journal Histoire sociale.
To register for this event, visit bit.ly/3tOqQPm. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email including details about how to join the webinar.
Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean is available for purchase now at Another Story Bookshop.