Background
Nikoli Attai received his PhD in Women and Gender Studies from the University of Toronto, a Master of Philosophy in Cultural Studies, and a Bachelor of Arts in Media and Communication from the University of the West Indies. His most recent book, Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean, was published in 2023.
Attai鈥檚 broader research focuses on queer experiences in the Anglophone Caribbean beyond notions of disease and violence, and the need to flee the region. He also investigates international queer asylum interventions in Canada and the Netherlands, and decolonial cultural formations in Trinidad and Tobago and the anglophone Caribbean. This work appears in several academic essays and his forthcoming co-edited collection titled Free Up Yuhself: Transgressive Bodies and Contestations in the Carnivalesque, which will be published by Rutgers University Press in May 2026.
Manuscripts
Nikoli Attai. 2023. Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean. Rutgers University Press. ISBN: 9781978830356.
- Won the Bronze Medal at the 2024 Independent Publisher鈥檚 Book Award (IPPY) for LGBTQ+ Non-Fiction Academic.
- Honored at the 2024 Caribbean Studies Association Author Celebration.
Nikoli Attai and Sue Ann Barratt. Free Up Yuhself: Transgressive Bodies and Contestations in the Carnivalesque. Forthcoming May 2026, Rutgers University Press.
Refereed Journal Articles
Nikoli Attai. 2017. 鈥.鈥 In Journal of Eastern Caribbean Studies Volume 42 No. 3.
"Wrestling with the Wajang: Trans femininities and the queer potentiality of gendered defiance." Forthcoming, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 12:3
Refereed Chapters in Books
Nikoli Attai. 鈥溾 In On Othering Processes and Politics of Unpeace, edited by Yasmin Saskia and Chad Haines. Athabasca University Press, Canada.
Nikoli Attai, K. Nandini Ghisyawan, Rajanie Preity Kumar and Carla Moore, 2020. 鈥淭ales from the Field: Myths and Methodologies for Researching Same-Sex Desiring People in the Caribbean.鈥 In Beyond Homophobia: Centering LGBT Experiences in the Caribbean, edited by Moji Anderson and Erin Macleod. UWI Press, Kingston, Jamaica. ISBN 13:9789766407445.
Cornel Grey and Nikoli Attai. 2019. 鈥淩evisiting LGBT Rights in the Caribbean: Talking Across Difference.鈥 In The Oxford Handbook of Global LGBT and Sexual Diversity Studies, edited by Michael Bosia, Sandra M. McEvoy, and Momin Rahman. ISBN: 9780190673741
Education
- PhD in Women and Gender Studies, University of Toronto, 2019
- MPhil in Cultural Studies, University of the West Indies, 2013
- BA in Media and Communication, University of the West Indies, 2007
Research Interests
- Queer and trans life in the Anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas
- Queer and trans asylum
- Caribbean festivals
- The Chinese Caribbean
- Community-centered ethnography