Academic writing

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.

ABOUT THE BOOK

Free Up Yuhself explores and theorizes what it means to embody and be empowered by the chaos of transgression, evaluating the implications for people who destabilize the Caribbean region’s dominant gender and sexuality politics within the Caribbean and the Caribbean diaspora. This book examines how people actively utilize the carnivalesque—spaces of festivity and places of excitement, the extraordinary, the ritualistic—to confront, negotiate, disrupt, and transgress normative trends, boundaries, and perspectives in the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora communities. This book is particularly concerned with the ways that Caribbean people contest sexual and gendered expectations through their bodily performances across regional and diasporic festival spaces. Through illustrative, analytical, evaluative, and reflective chapters, the collection contemplates the themes of freedom, belonging, acceptance, and recognition as these affect the experience of people’s sense of being. The authors reflect on “freeing up” as a contentious politics, understanding that people have the capacity to enact their freedom through transgressive movements and performances that persistently grapple with notions of respectability, agency, empowerment, disruption, and the meanings and consequences of their varied social and political locations.

Purchase From Rutgers University Press https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/free-up-yuhself/9781978846616

Nikoli Attai. 2025. “Wrestling with the Wajang Trans Femininities and the Queer Potential of Gendered Defiance.” In TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly Volume 12 Number 3.

ABSTRACT

Stereotypical femininity, as it is framed in the heteropatriarchal Caribbean imagination, is docile, domesticated, and controllable on one hand, and lascivious, loose, and slack on the other. Lived realities of the feminine, however, point to the varied experiences of feminine praxes that refuse to exist within the confines of heteropatriarchy. This article draws from the concept of the wajang—a term typically used to refer to unruly, disruptive, and unmannerly women—to think about the queer potentiality of wajang femininity as a defiant tool utilized by trans women to embrace the fullness of their lives as they negotiate violence and discrimination. The author uses this moment to celebrate Saucy Pow's life—a Black working‐class trans woman from Trinidad and Tobago who occupied and disrupted public space before her untimely death. The author meditates on the lessons we can learn from such a peripheral location to help us think more deeply about the kind of disruptive agency that is necessary for destabilizing restrictive gender in the Caribbean.

Key Words: trans Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago, queer defiance, queer potential, wajang

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

Nikoli Attai. 2026. “Memory Archives of a Not-So-Distant Past: Cufun Landolio Attai 1917–1985.” In The Asian Caribbean in the Caribbean Diaspora: Essays on Migration, Identity, and Literary and Cultural Representations, edited by Aleah Ranjitsingh. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing. ISBN: 9798216262602

Excerpt

."..It is in this box that I begin to discover my grandfather – the family man, the disciplinarian, the entrepreneur. Seemingly mundane artifacts are dispersed in between photographs and handwritten memos, such as newspaper clippings celebrating the anniversary of Chinese indentureship in Trinidad and Tobago, corporate advertisements, and local business magazines collected by my uncle. To my surprise and excitement, however, I was introduced to copies of handwritten letters to his mother, my great-grandmother, Lillian. He began to come to life as we sifted through the box and settled upon them. They made the stories I heard from my family about his life in rural Trinidad as a shopkeeper and a stern, no-nonsense patriarch feel real. These letters brought new promise that I might begin to form a more vivid image of him as he wrote over time from childhood to adulthood..."

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:

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-oxford-handbook-of-global-lgbt-and-sexual-diversity-politics-9780190673741?cc=ca&lang=en& 

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 

https://www.uwipress.com/9789766407445/beyond-homophobia/ 

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

https://www.aupress.ca/books/120321-on-othering/ 

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. 

https://islandstudiesjournal.org/files/ISJ.17.1.Reviews.pdf