Last Tuesday, July 16, SASOD Guyana hosted a book launch of Dr. Nikoli Attai’s “Defiant Bodies: Making Queer Community in the Anglophone Caribbean” as part of the organisation’s twenty-first anniversary celebrations. The event was held at Herdmanston Lodge Hotel and was well attended by the diplomatic corps, elected officials, civil society advocates and the media.
A citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, Dr. Attai is an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at Colorado State University (CSU) where he focuses on Black queer and feminist studies. Dr. Attai is also a co-manager of the CSU Collab Lab – a collaborative research hub that investigates the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality inform a sense of belonging in varied political, cultural, social, economic, and historical contexts.
Dr. Attai was motivated to write “Defiant Bodies” by his profound commitment to queer communities throughout the Caribbean, and to share their stories. Dr. Attai spent time in Guyana, Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, where he observed how queer and trans people navigated life with limited resources. He also conducted research with transgender sex workers in these countries.
In his thought-provoking presentation, Dr. Attai drew attention to the difficult, and often violent situations, faced by queer people to promote discussion of how to resist these challenges both in the Caribbean and globally. Dr. Attai asserted that it is vital to consider the Caribbean’s colonial legacy in order to understand the current situation in which archaic laws continue to oppress these groups. “It is also important to challenge the false western perception of the Caribbean as a uniformly homophobic place where queer people are only suffering, when, in reality, there are defiant communities that are flourishing,” he said at last week’s launch. Dr. Attai notes that queer life is thriving “beneath the radar of the mainstream public space” and across contexts that differ in terms of race, class, gender, and other socio-economic factors. Increasingly, queer communities are moving into the open by utilizing different social spaces that contribute to building community.
The launch concluded with an engaging discussion with attendees, during which Dr. Attai discussed strategies for promoting human rights for queer people in Guyana and the Caribbean.
