Upper-division undergraduates and above professionals. Riley Snorton’s book, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. 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. The author shares in the acknowledgments that he wrote this book “for those of you who have made new names and found new modes of naming.” That acknowledgment is the foundation of what his book accomplishes: to create new names and new modes of engaging with the past, and to wrestle with modes of categorization in literatures and archives, and with the collective amnesia that allows mainstream memory to forget Phillip DeVine as it memorializes Brandon Teena. The text is “an attempt to find a vocabulary for black and trans life … it works to do more than provide a ‘shadow history’ or blackness in trans studies or transness in black studies.” Snorton seeks vocabularies for black and trans life through the science of sexuality, through explorations of transatlantic literature, and through the afterlife of Phillip DeVine. He draws from multiple epistemologies to help readers reconsider “trans” as both a term and an identity. In tracing the twinned genealogies of blackness and transness, Snorton follows multiple trajectories, from the medical experiments conducted on enslaved black women by J. Snorton (Africana studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies, Cornell) makes an essential contribution to gender studies and black studies.

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