Academic writing
I have been actively expanding my scholarly repertoire and contribution to the fields of Caribbean gender and sexuality scholarship over the years. I hope that you enjoy reading my work and I look forward to engaging with you.
Books
ABOUT THE BOOK
In the Anglophone Caribbean, international queer human rights activists strategically located within and outside of the region have dominated interventions seeking to address issues affecting people across the region; a trend that is premised on an idea that the Caribbean is extremely homophobic and transphobic, resulting in violence and death for people who defy dominant sexual and gender boundaries. Human rights activists continue to utilize international financial and political resources to influence these interventions and the region’s engagement on issues of homophobia, transphobia, discrimination, and the HIV/AIDS epidemic. This focus, however, elides the deeply complex nature of queerness across different spaces and places, and fails to fully account for the nuances of queer sexual and gender politics and community making across the Caribbean. Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean problematizes the neocolonial and homoimperial nature of queer human rights activism in in four Anglophone Caribbean nations -- Barbados, Guyana, Jamaica, and Trinidad and Tobago -- and thinks critically about the limits of human rights as a tool for seeking queer liberation. It also offers critical insight into the ways that queer people negotiate, resist, and disrupt homophobia, transphobia, and discrimination by mobilizing “on the ground” and creating transgressive communities within the region.
Reviews
"Defiant Bodies honors the erotic autonomy and radical defiance of queer and trans people in the Caribbean. Through a fierce investigation into Caribbean sexual politics, the book offers an eloquent ethnographic study featuring engagement with Caribbean LGBTQ+ activists and careful critiques of human rights discourses. Ultimately, Nikoli Attai reveals the complex ways that queer people make community and create unexpected pathways for space and liberation in the region. Defiant Bodies is an outstanding contribution to the field of Caribbean queer and sexuality studies!"
--Angelique V. Nixon, author of Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture
"In Defiant Bodies, we finally have a book that centers trans Caribbean experiences, voices, and agency. Focusing on the lived experiences of Caribbean sexual and gender minorities, this book is a signal intervention because of its focus on resilience and agency rather than death and abjection. Attai embraces our 'unruly' and 'disruptive' trans and queer cousins, revealing their everyday experiences and resistance, as they create a 'politics of hope' for themselves that benefits us all."
--Rosamond S. King, author of Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination
Purchase From Rutgers University Press
https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/defiant-bodies/9781978830356
Forthcoming Books
Nikoli Attai and Sue Ann Barratt. Free Up Yuhself: Transgressive Bodies and Contestations in the Carnivalesque
(Under Blind Peer Review with the University of the West Indies Press).
Refereed Journal Articles
Nikoli Attai. 2017. “Let’s Liberate the Bullers! Toronto Human Rights Activism and Implications for Caribbean Strategies.” In Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies Volume 42 No. 3.
ABSTRACT
Caribbean queerness has gained increased attention by activists working in the Anglophone Caribbean. This is evidenced by a concerted effort engage publicly, a wide range of issues affecting queer people across the region. To this end, numerous advocacy groups have been formed in the region and in diaspora metropolitan cities in North America and Europe to address, among other things, the issue of criminalisation of homosexuality in Caribbean countries. This paper provides an overview of some of these recent human rights interventions, and also explores other popular campaigns in the region that focus on human rights for Caribbean queers.
Key Words: Human Rights, Queer Activism, Anglophone Caribbean,Canadian Homoimperialism
Forthcoming Journal Articles
Angelique Nixon and Nikoli Attai. 2023. “Erotic Defiance, Queer Belonging, and Sexual Citizenship in the Anglophone Caribbean.” In The Canadian Journal of History Special Issue, Queering Sexual and Gendered Citizenship in the Modern World, edited by Robert Teigrob. (Publication in Summer 2023).
Refereed Book Chapters
Cornel Grey and Nikoli Attai. 2019. “Revisiting LGBT Rights in the Caribbean: Talking Across Difference.” In The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Studies, edited by Michael Bosia, Sandra M. McEvoy, and Momin Rahman. ISBN: 9780190673741.
Abstract
This chapter takes up questions of sexual citizenship by examining the desire for and impact of LGBT rights discourses in the Anglophone Caribbean. The chapter works through the difficulties and aspirations of queer politics in the Caribbean to articulate a vision of citizenship and/or freedom that is not overdetermined by white Anglocentric models. Popular measurements of homophobia tell a partial story of queer life and sexual politics in the Caribbean, and this chapter attempts to fill that gap by pointing to the ways that queer people engage, challenge, redefine, and dissociate from laws and policies that mark their sexuality as antagonistic to nationhood. The chapter draws on Rinaldo Walcott’s mobilization of homopoetics to contextualize the political and cultural tensions between LGBT rights organizations in the Global North and organizers in the Caribbean. It offers blacklighting as a way to name the processes by which organizations and governments in the Global North doubly impose LGBT rights frameworks and forward antiblack narratives about Caribbean citizens. In closing, the chapter asks for a return to the question of LGBT rights and its deployment in the Caribbean and proposes a means of engagement that holds blackness alongside sexuality in matters of rights and citizenship.
Keywords: Caribbean, queer, citizenship, sexuality, blackness, blacklighting
Purchase from Oxford University Press:
Nikoli Attai, K. Nandini Ghisyawan, Rajanie Preity Kumar and Carla Moore, 2020. “Tales from the Field: Myths and Methodologies for Researching Same-Sex Desiring People in the Caribbean.” In Beyond Homophobia: Centering LGBT Experiences in the Caribbean, edited by Moji Anderson and Erin Macleod. UWI Press, Kingston Jamaica. ISBN - 13:9789766407445.
ABSTRACT
Research on Caribbean gender and sexualities has gained increased attention in conferences, academia, and in the public sphere. Much of this work has focused extensively on the homophobic contexts of same-sex desiring people’s experiences in the islands. Missing from the scholarship though, is a discussion on the challenges that researchers confront when studying this diverse, heterogeneous group of people. This panel focuses on research that looks specifically at same-sex desiring Caribbean people, and seeks to unpack both researchers’ and participants’ experiences before, within, and after research. The discussion addresses some of the popular claims and presumptions about homophobia in the Caribbean, and offers methodological and theoretical insights about framing and adjusting research practice in order to negotiate the cultural, economic, political, and sexual contexts that define regional realities.
Each discussant possesses a wealth of knowledge about doing research in this field, having engaged with same-sex desiring people in many islands including Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica and Guyana, and also within Caribbean diaspora networks in North America. It considers a wide array of issues including: (I) preconceived notions about research sites in the Caribbean, (II) useful methodologies for gathering data, (III) challenging hegemonic notions of homophobia, (IV) the importance of self-reflexive praxis, (V) and the ethical responsibilities of researchers doing research with same-sex desiring people.
Purchase from University ofthe West Indies Press
Nikoli Attai. “Global North Homoimperialism and the Conundrum of Queer Asylum” In On Othering Processes and Politics of Unpeace, edited by Yasmin Saskia and Chad Haines. Athabasca University Press, Canada. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993869.01
Abstract
The Anglophone Caribbean continues to be positioned as violently homophobic and transphobic; a narrative that bolsters an idea that queer people must leave the region in order to stay alive. But what happens when queer refuges receive asylum in countries like Canada and the Netherlands? How do they emerge in these countries as subjects indebted to the “help” that they receive? Drawing on the personal accounts of queer refugee experiences, this essay examines these questions as I interrogate how queer asylum seekers from the Caribbean are impacted by prevailing racial, political, cultural and social dynamics in these assumed safe havens.
Purchase from Athabasca University Press
Forthcoming Book Chapters
“Queering Resistance: Queer(in) Carnival City: Gay Caribbean Men’s Sexuality on de Road, in de Band and in de Fete,” In Memory Performance and Play, edited by Suzanne Burke. University of the West Indies Press.
Academic Reviews
NWIG 97-1&2 (2023)
Krystal Nandini Ghisyawan, Erotic Cartographies: Decolonization and the Queer Caribbean Imagination. New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2022. xii + 252pp. (Paper US$ 39.95)
https://brill.com/view/journals/nwig/97/1-2/article-p200_42.xml
Lyndon Gill (2018) Erotic Islands: Art and Activism in the Queer Caribbean. 312 pp. Durham, Duke University Press. ISBN: 978-0822368700 (Paperback). US$25.95.