Open events

How to figure oneself and one’s choices in the currently unfolding global ecological crisis? How might we contend with longstanding tensions about we humans’ varying and simultaneous recognition and denial of our animality, and the complex imbrications of these actions with desire and death in the context of an ecological emergency? And what might we learn from other animals’ own experiences with the disciplining and liberation of their wildness?

In this keynote presentation, Professor Andil Gosine elaborates key contentions in his recent book Nature’s Wild: Love, Sex and Law in the Caribbean, including his call for rejection of complicity with the historical onus put upon marginalized subjects—including queer, poor and non-white people—in the Americas to prove themselves “human, not animal.” Drawing upon artistic representations of the chicken and related interdisciplinary scholarship—e.g. on the entwinement of anxieties about bestiality and sodomy in law—and integrating autobiography that references his own experiences with chickens (as well as his own artwork), Dr. Gosine will weigh the tensions and choices we experience and face about our “wildness” in the midst of global ecological crisis, through discussion of visual artworks that have sprung from his text and which centre an interdisciplinary analysis of the chicken and its genetic precursor, the Sri Lankan junglefowl. Some of these works will make their public debut at the keynote, including Dr. Gosine’s textile tapestry “Chicken,” and his collaborative diptych completed with London-based painter Angie Quick.