Friday, February 20, 2015

A conversation with Kaneesha Parsard

Monday 23 February, 2015, 7 pm, at Alice Yard

Michel Jean Cazabon, View of Port of Spain from Laventille Hill

Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard is a PhD candidate in American Studies, African American Studies, and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University. During the 2014-15 academic year, she has been based in Trinidad conducting research for her dissertation, “Improper Dwelling: Space, Sexuality, and Colonial Modernity in the British West Indies, 1838-1962.” In October 2014, Parsard was researcher in residence at Alice Yard.

On Monday 23 February, at 7 pm, Parsard will give an informal talk at Alice Yard, based on the section of her dissertation on nineteenth-century artist Michel Jean Cazabon. She will examine Cazabon’s body of work in the context of post-emancipation land use and planning, focusing on scenes that contain overgrown plant life, winding paths, and figures that cast gazes beyond the frame. These scenes reframe the nineteenth-century Trinidad landscape as anti-picturesque, a space that challenges control, order, and production.

All are invited.