Events

“Unruly Visions: The Queer Regional Imaginaries of Sunil Gupta and Agha Shahid Ali”

ABSTRACT:  This talk considers the work of two contemporary South Asian diasporic artists, the poet Agha Shahid Ali and the photographer Sunil Gupta, within the framework of archive, region, and affect that Gopinath develops in her recently published book Unruly Visions.  Gopinath understands the work of Ali and Gupta as emblematic of what she terms “the aesthetic practices of queer diaspora.” These are practices thatnegotiate the intersection of race, sexuality, and migration in multiple geographic locations. She argues that through a sustained engagement with queer aesthetic practices, we can identify alternative ways of both seeing and knowing capable of challenging the scopic and sensorial regimes of colonial modernity as they persist in the present.