Events › Phanuel Antwi: On Cuddling

What can a cuddle tell us about intimacy, violence and racism?

In On Cuddling, Phanuel Antwi combines poetry and essays to stirring effect to highlight the interplay of intimacy with racial violence. Rooted in Black-feminist and queer teachings, Antwi has crafted a collection that is both urgent and elegant, playful and vulnerable, showing us the violence that can lurk behind the comfort of the cuddle— and how to face it with resistance and solidarity.

Professor Phanuel Antwi will appear conversation with fellow UBC Professor Cecily Nicholson, and SFU Professor Nadine Attewell. 

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Phanuel Antwi is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures at UBC. In 2022 he was named Canada Research Chair in Black Arts and Epistemologies. He is an artist, curator, organiser concerned with race, poetics, movements, intimacy and struggle. 

Cecily Nicholson is an Associate Professor in the UBC School of Creative Writing. She is the author of four books and past recipient of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize (2015) and the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry (2018). She is the first honouree of the Phyllis Webb Memorial Reading award from the Poetry in Canada Society (2023) and 2024/2025 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry and Poetics at UC Berkeley.

Nadine Attewell is an Associate Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies at SFU. She is a scholar of empire, intimacy, and Asian and Asian diasporic life. Her first book, Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire, was published in 2014. She's currently working on a SSHRC-funded second book, entitled Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Asian Lives in the Colonial Port City, about Chinese practices of interracial intimacy and multiracial community under British colonial rule.