Preface
Introduction
Part I. Blacken
1. Anatomically Speaking: Ungendered Flesh and the Science of Sex
2. Trans Capable: Fungibility, Fugitivity, and the Matter of Being
Part II. Transit
3. Reading the Trans- in Transatlantic Literature: On the “Female” Within the Three Negro Classics
Part III. Blackout
4. A Nightmarish Silhouette: Racialization and the Long Exposure of Transition
5. DeVine's Cut: Public Memory and the Politics of Martydom
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
C. Riley Snorton is associate professor of Africana studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University and visiting associate professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Minnesota, 2014).
"Black on Both Sides challenges the historical account of trans
studies invention by excavating a black trans presence and persona
long before modern articulations of such. C. Riley Snorton offers
us a way to read the historical record in a fashion that requires
the unthought to be the basis of the foundation for our claims of
newness, demonstrating that there is no revision of what it means
to be human without coming through blackness, past and
present."—Rinaldo Walcott, author of Queer Returns: Essays on
Multiculturalism, Diaspora, and Black Studies"C. Riley Snorton's
Black on Both Sides is a welcome contribution to black studies with
the potential to influence future directions in the burgeoning
field of transgender studies. It is rigorous scholarship that
manages to be imaginative and timely."—Kara Keeling, author of The
Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of
Common Sense"In a beautifully written and brilliant intervention
and extension—the first full length book ‘to examine the historical
and contemporary importance of race to the constitution of “trans
gender”’—C. Riley Snorton identifies and performs a black trans
reading practice, from Anarcha to Transgender Days of
Remembrance."—Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness
and Being
"The research done here is stellar."—Washington Blade"This book is
an outstanding contribution to conversations about black and trans
studies; it will transform scholarly understandings of both fields
and the intersections between them."—CHOICE"Black on Both Sides
reminds us that when we are careful about how we tell stories, we
get new, nuanced stories that expose systems for what they are and
that honor historically ignored populations."—Autostraddle"Black on
Both Sides offers a new imagining of both black and trans history
beginning in the early 19th century through the present."—Into
News"Black on Both Sides is both important and timely. In an era
where transgender acceptance and violence are both at an all-time
high, the book reiterates the need for a historical analysis of all
disenfranchised and overlooked people. Snorton offers a unique
perspective into the burgeoning field of transgender
history."—H-Net Reviews"Explores how such important scientific
advances as the development of modern gynaecology, for example,
took place through and with repeated experimentation on enslaved
Black women."—Wear Your Voice Magazine"C. Riley Snorton’s book
Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity is a
field-changing, paradigm-shifting, once-in-a-generation book that
will be read and reckoned with for years to come."—American
Historical Review"Carried by an extensive archive of materials such
as fugitive slave narratives, sensationalist journalism, and
Afro-modernist literature, Snorton gives insight into the
importance of black history in relation to of transgender topics.
Snorton illuminates how the foundations for "understanding gender
as mutable" derive from the horrifics of slavery. Snorton's
research proves to be an outstanding and well-needed addition to
the conversation of black and trans communities."—PopSugar"It is
unquestionable that Black On Both Sides will quickly become
necessary reading for anyone thinking about blackness, transness,
gender, or historiography. Implicit in its argument is how integral
questions of blackness and transness are to numerous other
“unrelated” fields: emblematic of such is the sheer number of
citations in each chapter (in multiple chapters citation count is
in excess of 125), which is less a citational overload and instead
an indication of black/trans’s relevance to scholars in fields from
black studies to transgender studies, continental philosophy to
history to journalism. Snorton’s articulation of such an original
historiographical theorization, and serious advancement of the
analytic properties (rather than strictly identificatory) of
blackness and transness, makes this book a groundbreaking text with
which anyone in the aforementioned fields, among numerous others,
would be remiss not to grapple rigorously."—Journal of African
American History"Black on Both Sides holds a needed critique of the
real, lived dangers of liberal inclusion and an identity politics
that stubbornly refuses to address ongoing systemic forces that
feed into dangerous and deadly circumstances for Black and trans
people, including interpersonal violence as well as systemic forces
of policing and incarceration, job discrimination, and social
isolation. Beyond this, it offers and prioritizes the beauty of
those lives that move through the interstices and oversights of
categorization, holding a resonant claim to life and
meaning."—Gender and Women’s Studies"Black on Both Sides is a
rigorous historical and theoretical project that seeks to
complicate how we understand blackness at an onto- logical level.
What Snorton does exceptionally well is to offer readers the
opportunity to consider the ways in which the narrowness of
disciplinary boundaries within the academy have rendered queerness
and transness as periphery subjects in black history. In this way
the book functions as a call to think more expansively about trans
studies and black studies."—Journal of the History of Sexuality"C.
Riley Snorton ambitiously develops a capacious trans genealogy,
which culminates in transgender but arrives there through the
motion across categories contained in such derivatives as
transitivity and transversality. Not a conventional history, the
book is more a set of associative assemblages, a racial poetics of
transness, a densely theoretical challenge to historical
method."—Journal of American History"C. Riley Snorton’s Black on
Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity is an outstanding
theorization and history of the interdependence and co-
construction of race and gender in the United States."—Oxford
University Press Journals"Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of
Trans Identity provides an intricate and well-developed weaving of
the past to the present."—QED: A Journal in LGBTQ "An
incredible insight to how Black people pioneered being out as
transgender... A great source and reference for historical events
that took place that could help readers with awareness and
understanding of the trans community."—Outvoices Nashville
Ask a Question About this Product More... |