Nature’s Wild

Description

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 Andil Gosine revises understandings of queer desire in the Caribbean, showing 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. Andil Gosine is Professor of Environmental Arts and Justice at York University and coauthor of Environmental Justice and Racism in Canada. Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. Puhngah!  13
2. Clothes Make the Man  32
3. The Father, a Godfather, and the Specter of Beasts Old and New  62
4. Désir Cannibale  103
5. Natures' Wild  130
Notes  153
Works Cited  159
Index  171

Additional information