Yale University
14-15 November 2014

A Small Axe Project event

Description from the organizers:

Our aim in this project is to reflect on, and to stimulate the production of, creative and critical work that takes seriously the emergence of heterodox personal and public identities, identities that breach or subvert or evade the heteronormativities of colonial and postcolonial modes of being and self-expression. Growing in part out of our concern about the catastrophes of sexual othering, not to say sexual violence, so rampant in the Caribbean, we wish to ask, simply, whether or to what extent “queer” offers a way of understanding the contemporary in Caribbean visual art practice, and in scholarly considerations of this practice. Why is it imperative for Caribbean cultural workers—intellectuals and artists—to think the efficacy of “queer”? What might thinking through “queer” illuminate about the contemporary in Caribbean art practice?

Symposium program

(All events will be held at Henry R. Luce Hall, MacMillan Center, Yale University 34 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, Connecticut)

friday, 14 november

5pm Welcome Reception

6:30 pm Film Screening.

“She” (2012)

Children of God (2010)

saturday, 15 november

8:30am Breakfast

9: 00 Introduction

9:15 Session I: Kareem Mortimer and Roshini Kempadoo

10:15 Session II: Andil Gosine and Vanessa Agard Jones

11:15 Coffee Break

11:30 Session III: Leasho Johnson and Patricia Saunders

12:30 Lunch

2:00 Session IV: Ewan Atkinson and Jafari Allen

3:00 Session V: Ebony Patterson and Nadia Ellis

4:00 The Way Forward

5:00 Closing Reception

 

For more information, visit the Small Axe website