A conversation with Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua & Angelique V. Nixon, moderated by Dean Itsuji Saranillio
This panel places in conversation scholar/activists situated in the Caribbean and the Pacific to highlight the interrconnections between these two regions through a queer, feminist, and Indigenous studies lens. From the ongoing fight against the settler state in Hawai’i, to the struggle against an extractivist, tourism-centric model of development in the Caribbean, the panel foregrounds how queer/feminist/Indigenous scholars, activists, and artists make connections between the politics of food, land, water, and sovereignty, and offer a vision for a more livable, mutually dependent future.
Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, Political Science, University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa
Angelique V. Nixon, Gender and Development Studies, The University of the West Indies, Trinidad & Tobago
Dean Itsuji Saranillio, Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University
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This event is free & open to the public. Venue is wheelchair accessible.
Please contact CSGS at csgs@nyu.edu or 212-992-9540 for more information.
Facebook event page here.
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Organized by the NYU Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality; co-sponsored by the Asian/Pacific/American Institute, Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, Center for the Study of Africa & the African Diaspora, & the Native Studies Forum.
About the Speakers:
A lifetime student of and participant in Hawaiian movements, Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua works as Professor and Chair of Political Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Her research has involved documenting, analyzing and proliferating the ways people are transforming imperial and settler colonial relations through Indigenous political values and initiatives. This includes books The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School and A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land and Sovereignty. Her most recent book, Nā Wāhine Koa: Hawaiian Women for Sovereignty and Demilitarization (UH Press, 2019) is a collaboration with four activist women elders who played key roles in catalyzing the contemporary Hawaiian movement. Noe is a co-founder of Hālau Kū Māna public charter school and an active board member for the Kānehūnāmoku Voyaging Academy and Hui o Kuapā Keawanui, both of which use Native Hawaiian ocean-based technologies and practices to help create resilient Indigenous futures. Most of all, Noe is a mother of three and a woman of the ocean.
Angelique V. Nixon is a Bahamas-born, Trinidad-based writer, artist, community worker and scholar-activist. She is also a Lecturer and Researcher at the Institute for Gender and Development Studies at The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad and Tobago. Angelique’s research, poetry, and artwork have been published and featured widely. She is author of Saltwater Healing: A Myth Memoir and Poems, an art and poetry chapbook collection (2013). Her scholarly book Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture (2015) won the Caribbean Studies Association 2016 Barbara T. Christian Award for Best Book in the Humanities. As co-chair of the Caribbean IRN (digital network on diverse genders and sexualities), she has co-edited 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). Her research and teaching areas include Caribbean and postcolonial studies, African diaspora literatures, gender and sexuality studies, tourism and diaspora studies, and transnational migrations. Angelique’s current work in progress investigates Caribbean freedom, social movements and decolonial poetics at the crossroads of climate and migration crisis and unsustainable development. Angelique is active in Caribbean movements for social and environmental justice and is committed to intersectional queer feminist praxis, decolonial politics and Black liberation. She is co-director of the feminist and LGBTI organisation CAISO: Sex & Gender Justice, and leads a human rights, activity-based project called Sexual Culture of Justice (working to end gender based violence and LGBTI discrimination) in Trinidad and Tobago. Angelique strives through her activism, writing, and art to disrupt silences, challenge systems of oppression, and carve spaces for resistance and desire.