Andil Gosine, Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law (2021)

This publication is currently on backorder. Please contact the gallery for more information or place an order through our website and we will be in touch when we receive copies at the gallery.
 
 
Andil Gosine
Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex, and Law in the Caribbean
Published: October 2021
Pages: 192
Illustrations: 35 illustrations, incl. 11 in color
Softcover
Paper ISBN: 978-1-4780-1458-4
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4780-1365-5
eISBN: 978-1-4780-2188-9
 
 
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.
 
Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient