Assistant Professor of World Literature
Subhalakshmi Gooptu
- School of Liberal Arts and Sciences
- English and Communication Studies
Watery Archives
Transoceanic Narratives in Andil Gosine’s Our Holy Waters, and Mine
In this article, I conceptualize Andil Gosine’s artistic archives as ‘watery’ to chart a feminist genealogy of archival practice. I argue that routing interdisciplinary studies of Atlantic and Indian Oceans through the Caribbean provides a transoceanic method to analyse race and sexuality within Indo-Caribbean connections. To that end, I examine the representation of water and waterways in Gosine’s Our Holy Waters, and Mine (2014) to illustrate how relations with water provides a heuristic and representative practice for critiquing afterlives of colonialism and indentureship. I bring together Indo-Caribbean feminist epistemology, scholarship on feminist and queer archival practices and ocean studies to read Gosine’s experimental artistic practice as offering ways to rethink oceanic materiality in the context of historical and archival knowledge production.
Appears in: Feminist Review, Volume 130 Issue 1 (March 2022).
How did you first come up with the idea for this work?
The idea for this article emerged from my interest in seeing how literature and art engages with the many problems of official and institutional archives.
What was your research process like?
I began identifying what artists and scholar have explored within the field of postcolonial studies, then began to scour my resources for artwork and literature that engages with my interest. Writing and revising always forms a huge part of my research process. I allow the needs of my writing process guide my research and vice versa.
How long did you work on this before it was published?
About one year.
Does this work relate to your role at FIT? If so, how?
It engages with anti-colonial forms of art and expression, and in my role as assistant professor of world literature, I teach course from these perspectives.
- Professor at FIT since Fall 2022