Join Richard Fung, Kamala Kempadoo, Jillian Ollivierre and Andil Gosine in conversation for the launch of Gosine's award-winning new book Nature's Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean on its international day of publication, and in conjunction with the 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 embrace of one’s “wild nature.”  

Copies of Nature's Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean are available for sale at Another Story Bookshop.

Andil Gosine is Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University. The companion touring exhibition for his book Nature’s Wild will launch its three year tour in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in January 2022. He is also curator of everything slackens in a wreck-, which  will open at the Ford Foundation Gallery in New York in Spring 2022.

Richard 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. His many contributions have been recognized with the Kessler Award (in 2015) and the Bonham Centre Award (in 2019).

Kamala Kempadoo is 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 author of the groundbreaking text Sexing the Caribbean.

Jillian 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.