Andil Gosine and Rajiv Mohabir: A Pride Love-Up

Moderated by Tzarina Prater

The authors will read from each other’s books (Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean and Antiman) and have a conversation about legacies of queer “wrecking work” by indentured workers and their descendants.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Andil Gosine is Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University in Toronto, and author of Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean (Duke University Press, 2021). His research, curatorial and artistic practice considers historical and contemporary imbrications of desire, power and ecology, and the work represented in everything slackens in a wreck emerged from his multi-year project “Visual Arts After Indenture,” which also led to numerous publications, including special editions of Small Axe, Wasafiri and Asian Diasporic Visual Arts of the Americas. He is currently engaged in creative collaborations with many artists to further elaborate ideas in Nature’s Wild toward the production of new creative works which will be exhibited at various venues internationally over the next five years.

Rajiv Mohabir is the author of three poetry collections, the latest of which is Cutlish (Four Way Books 2021, Finalist for the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award, longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry), and translator of I Even Regret Night: Holi Songs of Demerara (1916) (Kaya Press 2019) which received a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant Award and the 2020 Harold Morton Landon Translation Award from the Academy of American Poets. His memoir Antiman (Restless Books 2021, Finalist for the PEN Open Book Award, and the 2022 Publishing Triangle Randy Shilts Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir), received the 2019 Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor of poetry in the MFA program at Emerson College and the translations editor at Waxwing Journal.

Tzarina T. Prater is an Associate Professor of English in Bentley University’s English and Media Studies Department where she has taught a variety of courses from the disciplines of African American and Anglophone Caribbean Literary, Gender and Cultural Studies, as well as courses intersecting with Digital Humanities. She has published articles on the work of Easton Lee, Kerry Young, Michelle Cliff, Patricia Powell, U.S. spectatorship of Hong Kong action cinema, digital platforms, Caribbean music and science fiction. Her book project, Labrish and Mooncakes: Afterlives of Chinese Indenture in Jamaican Literary and Cultural Production is forthcoming from SUNY Press.

Image Caption: Wendy Nanan, Baby Krishna, 2020 Papier-mache, oil paint.

Ford Foundation Gallery

everything slackens in a wreck

Curated by Andil Gosine

June 1 – August 20, 2022

Gallery hours: Monday – Saturday 11:00 am – 6:00 pm