We are thrilled to announce that Prof. Rinaldo Walcott (University at Buffalo) will give a guest lecture on "Here and There: The Queer Caribbean in Canada" on June 10, 2026. It will take place at the Department of English and American Studies, Hof 8.3., Room 5, from 12:15-13:45.

The guest lecture is free and open to the public.

Here and There: The Queer Caribbean in Canada

This lecture will explore how queer Caribbean people navigate, create, and make community from the Caribbean region to Canada. It takes as its starting point Makeda Silvera's still important 1992 intervention on the invisibility of lesbians to roam around and grapple with a range of texts and social histories to think about how Caribbean queer life and cultural expression has changed since 1992. Jamaican Canadian Silvera, an important writer, publisher, and activist, was a co-founder of Sister Vision Press, which published some important queer Caribbean work in Canada. In this paper, I study how Caribbean Canadian queer encounters have resulted in the production of a wide range of scholarly literature and other forms of cultural expression that make visible and present a queer Caribbean subjectivity in Canada and beyond. This paper takes seriously that what happens in Canada refracts what occurs in the region and vice versa. Working across film, poetry, literature, photography, and more I argue that queer Caribbean life in Canada is exemplary of a queer sociality that defies national boundaries.