Queer Trouble in Caribbean Art & Activism

A Conversation with Rosamond S. King & Angelique V. Nixon

6:00pm – 8:00pm
23 October 2018
Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality (CSGS)
285 Mercer Street, 4th Floor


Rosamond S. King, English, Brooklyn College, City University of New York


Angelique V. Nixon, Institute for Gender & Development Studies, University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad

Two award winning artist-scholars reflect on the intersections of LGBTQI and feminist arts, activism, and politics in the Caribbean. King and Nixon address how their own work moves between these different registers. They also discuss how they see contemporary queer Caribbean performance, literature, and visual art engage and resist the ongoing violences of colonial and postcolonial histories, and how these works offer us vibrant models of desire, embodiment, and collectivity.

Rosamond S. King is a critical and creative writer whose scholarly work focuses on sexuality, performance, and literature in the Caribbean and Africa. Her book Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination received the Caribbean Studies Association best book award, her poetry collection Rock|Salt|Stone won a Lambda Literary Award, and she has performed around the world. King is Co-Chair of the Caribbean International Resource Network, President of the Organization of Women Writers of Africa, creative editor of sx salon, and Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York.

Angelique V. Nixon is a Bahamas-born, Trinidad-based writer, artist, teacher, scholar, activist, and poet. She is a lecturer and researcher at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad & Tobago. Her scholarly book Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture (University Press of Mississippi 2015) won the Caribbean Studies Association 2016 Barbara T. Christian Award for Best Book in the Humanities. She is author of Saltwater Healing – A Myth Memoir and Poems – an art and poetry chapbook collection (Poinciana Paper Press, sold-out limited edition 2013). And she is co-editor of two multimedia online collections: Theorizing Homophobias in the Caribbean: Complexities of Place, Desire, and Belonging (2012) and Love | Hope | Community: Caribbean Sexualities and Social Justice (2017). She is active in movements for gender and sexual justice in the Caribbean. Angelique strives through her activism, writing, and art to disrupt silences, challenge systems of oppression, and carve spaces for resistance and desire.

Co-sponsored by the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies; Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; Contemporary Art Research Collective; Institute of African American Affairs & Center for Black Visual Culture; and the Program in Africana Studies, Department of Social & Cultural Analysis.

This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair-accessible. For more information about this event, please contact the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality at csgsnyu@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540.