Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (EUC) Professor Andil Gosine is the guest co-editor of Wasafiri Issue 110: Afterlives of Indenture – exploring the legacy of indentured workers across the Indo-Caribbean and the diasporic experience.
Among the contributors of the Summer 2022 issue is co-editor Nalini Mohabir, assistant professor at Concordia University; filmmaker Richard Fund; novelist-poet Ramabai Espinet; life writing from Maria del Pilar Kaladeen and more.
Gosine was joined by Mohabir on Tuesday, July 5 at the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Jackman Hall to present the special issue of Wasafiri.
In addition, Espinet presented a collage performance alongside Giller nominee Shani Mootoo and poet Faizal Deen. The event was presented by Another Story Bookshop, the Art and Social Change program at OCAD (Ontario College of Art & Design University), and York University’s EUC.
Gosine described the newly released Wasafiri issue and event as “a dream gathering of talent.”
“The short stories, the essays, the interviews, poems are just very compelling writing,” he said. “That the common thread between them is a connection to indentureship in the Caribbean additionally sheds light on the legacy of that system and, perhaps more importantly, the creative vitality of Caribbean folks in negotiating their conditions of life.”
Gosine explained in the 1990s, “York University was a key site for organizing for Indo-Caribbean communities in the city, and numerous lectures and events, mostly thanks to the incredible work of former Professor of English Frank Birbalsingh.”
He noted the latest magazine edition continues that connection in some way as the Wasafiri Issue 110 is landmark issue that brings together a vast collection of writers whose ancestries trace back to the indentureship program that brought Asians to the Caribbean in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Gosine is also curator of the exhibition everything slackens in the wreck at the Ford Foundation in New York City, which is running until Aug. 20 and demonstrates a long, continuing history of survival and the particular contours of four featured artists’ lives and their necessary choices within the various spaces they inhabit in the Americas.
Kelly Sinnapah Mary, an exhibiting artist in Gosine’s latest project, is also the artist of Notebook of No Return, the acrylic painting on the magazine’s cover.
To learn more about the latest Wasafiri issue, visit the magazine’s website.