“Survival is a relational praxis”
C. Riley Snorton interviewed by Noura mutima Brock-Jaber
C. Riley Snorton is a professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago. He is a cultural theorist focusing on racial, sexual, and transgender histories and cultural productions. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), and coeditor of Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (New Museum/MIT Press, 2020). He is also the coeditor of the flagship journal in queer studies, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, published by Duke University Press. Snorton’s next monograph, tentatively titled Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning, examines the constitutive presence of swamps to racial practices and formations in the Americas.
NMBJ: Before we start, I’d love your help understanding something you cited at the beginning of Black on Both Sides. You mention Claire Colebrook’s definition of trans as a “not-yet-differentiated singularity from which these identities are generated in a form of stability” and then continue: “Transitivity is the condition for what becomes known as the human.” I wanted your help understanding the difference between that cited definition and your slightly different definition.
CRS: Colebrook’s conception is that transitivity is the kind of primordial matter in which all kinds of matter proliferates. And if we think about something like Darwin’s theory of evolution: perhaps for Colebrook, transness is actually the beginning of that kind of evolutionary practice. And so transitivity is, in many ways, a kind of theory of change, but one that I think—interestingly—situates transness as the central engine or the matter of change itself.
You know, I was thinking about transitivity alongside transversality, and for me, those concepts also are always working in tandem. If I had to think about, like, what is the kind of matter that produces differentiation? I’m thinking, really—at least in the modern world—about Blackness. I think Blackness becomes a way of marking distinction in modern thought. And so, you know, what I was interested in was transitivity as an engine of change or as a way to mark the possibility of change. But transversality is a kind of always-present set of ethical limitations to that. What was so compelling to me, thinking with Edouard Glissant around his notion of transversality, is this idea that there is collateral. It’s not that we’re moving through time and space, and nobody else is implicated by that. Rather, the implication is often a hard one.
NMBJ: I really enjoyed the Black on Both Sides audiobook. I find those easier to digest, and I was really happy that you were reading it; it made me smile. Several times I heard you take a big breath after a particularly trauma-heavy sentence. And whether you did that as an act of vulnerability or not, it helps me—a Black trans person affected by the content—lean into aspects of the text. Did the audiobook recording process teach you anything new about your work?
CRS: I feel very proud of being able to do the audiobook because, well, one, I made it my stipulation that the book had to be read by Black trans people. And I was looking around, chatting with friends of mine who are actors, like, “Do you want to come in?” It took at least two years to sort out who was going to read the book. I didn’t initially think that I would be the right person. Some of that had to do with matters of my transition. But when it had gone on long enough, I was like, “Okay, fine. I’ll submit this little video of me reading something. You let me know what you think.”
I was so glad I could allow myself to be emotional about it. It has been important when talking about the book. Part of me feels like if I could ever just read it and not think that this is deep and not think that there are so many moments of intense grief and trauma here, then I’ve become too dissociated from the work I’m thinking through.
Another confession: I haven’t listened to the audiobook. I think I feel a little bit nervous about hearing my voice. But now I’m grateful that my audio engineer left those moments in because it wasn’t just the labor of not misreading or mispronouncing words that I’m more accustomed to thinking with on the page. It was also about being with the feelings of the book. Incidentally, the first chapter on Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy, and the unnamed others and the archives of Sims took the longest for me to read. Everything else started to fall into place, and we found a rhythm. But it was because of the violence in those narratives—it was hard to get through that chapter.
NMBJ: Thank you for putting so much work into the reading. I think you should listen to the recording. I liked it.
I’m curious: How do you consume media, news, and current events? Do you spend a lot of time reading the news? Do you have preferred venues, or do you let it come to you?
CRS: This is probably generational, but my news is filtered through Twitter. I was trained in media studies, so I bring a healthy skepticism to US news media sources. But then I also have this open-mindedness and open-ended interest in all modes of popular culture.
For me, Twitter is great. I get my feeds from folks on the ground doing the work, who can give me a certain perspective. And I’m getting a curated list of news articles to read. I am—well, I am not convinced by the idea that any news is fair or balanced or that we need to read in a quote, unquote “fair and balanced” way. I am not interested, for example, in reading articles about trans people where their personhood is being undermined in the language of the news source itself. So I think it’s been helpful for me to be a part of trans Twitter, Black Twitter, kind of giving a sense of things from perspectives that I already hold.
So yeah, I’m part of that generational problem, according to some folks, but I think it’s meaningful. Certainly, there’ve been so many conversations that spiked in the summer of 2020, when the uprisings were happening and we were being quarantined. A lot of folks were… “digesting at [their] own pace.” In some ways, Black on Both Sides was my scholarly way of doing this. There’s something that feels meaningful: a form of exercising my autonomy, let’s say, that has to do with feeling able to move through the media landscape slowly, feeling able to move through the archive.
Historians suggest we can’t know what this time is. Now, that’s a little that’s true and may be slightly overstated, right? We have a sense of, we have feelings, we have analysis that suits us at the moment. It doesn’t have to be the analysis for all time. But I also think there’s so much unfolding, and we don’t see what we can’t see. Being a contemporary historian is being very comfortable with the partial. Black on Both Sides is both signaling my practice of current events being wedded to the partial and expressing that sensibility as it relates to storytelling from archives or storytelling as a form of theory itself.
NMBJ: Wow, thank you. Love that bit about not being afraid of bias, not trying to pretend to avoid bias. I would love to hear more of your thoughts on this question—it comes up in different forms in your work—this question of how to venerate flesh, how flesh becomes memorialized. In the context of all unfolding now, do any current events raise similar questions on your Twitter timeline?
CRS: That remains a question I don’t know how to answer. I think about colleagues—colleagues and comrades, let’s say, in the academy and my people in the streets. For example, in Chicago, one of the forms of reparation coming out of the terrible torture cases with the Chicago Police Department is this public art memorial. It incorporates some survivors of this police torture. And maybe my concern is about getting fixated on the thing and not being attuned to the process. I think that flesh can be venerated. I think that flesh is a site of generativity. This probably just sounds like, oh, of course, you are a trans person who does trans theory, but I just worry about people getting so caught up on the destination and not on the process of arriving, of becoming.
This is why I love the final chapter in Tiffany King’s The Black Shoals. King writes about being in community with indigenous folks in Canada. There’s a chapter on this kind of sculpture-making, but it’s about the process of being invited in to see that process. I enjoy that the project often upends the notion of monumentalization, then ends in a much more intimate, relational practice of memory.
NMBJ: I found your description of Black gender and sex as anagrammatical compelling. I wanted to know if you have any thoughts on, like, what happens to a person’s sex after they die. Since it’s a kind of physical, kind of a metaphysical thing. Where does it go? What happens to it?
CRS: So many sparks are going off in my mind right now! Thinking about the afterlife of sex.
I consider myself a student of Saidiya Hartman, even though she was never my actual teacher. So, I think a lot about the afterlives of slavery. She indexed several practices that extend or muddy the temporalities of slavery and the present such that emancipation is a non-event. When you ask me this question of after death, in all kinds of spiritual registers, I am thinking a lot about what we might say is the ongoing practice of extraction around certain forms of racialized sexuality. Also, what we might think of as the excess and residual of racist—racialized sexuality, certainly shapes the contemporary. Why go to the past to write a book about Blackness and transness? In many ways, these are figures and conditions that shape our current set of possibilities that conditions of the present.
Your question brings to mind what I held for some time as a real fear about what happens to trans folks, particularly after death, and the ways that folks are coercive, like “cistized” after death. I just want to note that that’s present; that’s there. It does raise the stakes and brings the question of memorialization, or public grief, into stark relief: it’s about contesting the forces that would want to normativize and erase the kinds of trans lives that have been lived, seen and held in community.
And certainly, the preface of Black on Both Sides is about the various scales of violence and animus directed at Blackness and transness. And also (to use a word that I became aware of through Hortense Spillers) the intramural conversations, the intramural protocol. As Black trans people, how do we think about that? How do we sit with the loss and the sense of imminent—the threat of imminent violence that also shapes so much of the present?
NMBJ: Yeah, it’s like, where can we do that without all of the other stuff on the outside that we’re supposed to be getting away from?
CRS: Exactly.
NMBJ: How do you, the individual, resist social norms around Blackness, gender, and sexuality that would limit your personal freedoms?
CRS: I’m constantly thinking about what structures my sense of autonomy. I’m attuned to where I feel limited around that. I feel like certain matters of what I do for a living produce particular kinds of structures around what it means to experience my freedom. I think I’ll say that the more senior I have gotten in my field, the more constraint I feel.
But, in some senses, I’m always living in the world, looking at models. I’m talking to friends, I’m watching TV, I’m teaching in the classroom, and there are certain kinds of small gestures, small moments where I’m like, oh, that seems like a person who’s exercising their freedom in this moment. Back to the beginning of our conversation: I don’t think about freedom as a state or a destination; it’s an ongoing practice. I think of myself as a student of practices. And then also, perhaps self-consciously, marking some practices for myself as moments where I’m doing that: I’m exercising my freedom.
I don’t think it always has to be these huge gestures. They can be quite mundane, done in a space one marks for themselves and cherishes—both in the heart and the mind. Knowing there’s a kind of amorphous they that wants you to do otherwise, you’re just choosing not to. It makes me think about Kara Keeling’s recent book, where she is really drawn to thinking about Bartleby and “I prefer not to.” I think about those forms of refusal—as well as, sometimes, just the articulation that you would prefer not to—as ways of marking one’s difference and living in that different sort of way.
NMBJ: Thank you for that. Have you read the Blanche White mysteries by Barbara Neely?
CRS: No, I’m gonna write it down.
NMBJ: Much of what you’ve said reminds me of the protagonist. She’s this Black lady who’s a domestic worker; she manipulates social expectations of her complexion, size, and work to be a detective.
CRS: Wow. That makes me think about one of the Black Lady Sketch Show bits: the one about the “invisible agent.” Because of her corporeality, most people don’t see her. She’ll be in the room, and they’ll say, “oh, like, we’re looking for so-and-so.” And then the most recent—this is a spoiler— the most recent one is, she’s visible to Black gay men, and so she has to actually enlist someone else who would be invisible to them to finish her mission. It’s been fascinating, and one of the sketches I enjoyed from that show. I’ve been watching every season.
NMBJ: My last question: What poetry pairs well with your work?
CRS: For the new project I’m working on, which is about how swamps constitute racial practices in the Americas, I’ve been sitting with Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon and Carl Phillips. There are poems from both of them that I became low-key obsessed about. So I recorded them, made them voice memos, and I would play them with other music on my phone. That’s certainly part of a soundtrack for the project. It’s been so instructive just being on the site of creative work. I was listening to a lot of battle hip-hop while writing Black on Both Sides. That’s kind of the space I was in.
As the book was coming out, I got a new tattoo: a couple of lines from Lucille Clifton’s “won’t you celebrate with me.” won’t you celebrate with me what I have made into a kind of life/I had no model was the stakes of Black on Both Sides. So, I wanted to nuance what it means to think about models. So many of those figures, the tactics they used to survive: can we revive them? Can we revise them? How do we think expansively about the tools necessary to survive?
NMBJ: How would you relate that to our earlier conversation about veneration? That was about flesh, but do you see a connection between venerating flesh and reaching back for a model?
CRS: This is really about the question of survival. These figures may be heroes for some; I have deep admiration and respect for some of them. I’m not trying to shade anybody that I wrote about. I’m saying I have more complex sets of feelings about some people. I reached back to think about what tactics have been repressed, suppressed, and ignored. What can we bring back to the surface in service of survival? Audre Lorde gives so much resonant language to this in poetry and prose. It’s not about survival as the bare minimum. Survival is a kind of deep, spiritual, relational praxis. It reaches back in time, and it reaches forward in time.
I’m working on this project with some collaborators in Toronto. And we’ve got collaborators in Cuba, Brazil, and Colombia. We’re working on hemispheric, Afro-indigenous ways of knowing. I think that comes from the understanding that there are so many strategies for survival and resilience that are, you know, actively put under a ratio. And so this is more of a kind of contemporary arts-based project that’s about surfacing those more and having them live in an intramural conversation. I think that’s related to the mud project, too.
But I also think one of my wishes, one of my ways of exercising freedom, let’s say, is that I don’t feel like I’m always going to be transparent about the communities I am thinking about, right? I’m thinking about Black trans people, but this project is about mud. And maybe there’s gonna be no trans-identified people in this project; we don’t know. But it is a trans studies project. So for me, it’s also about exercising freedom and giving oneself room to wander, giving oneself room to roam, and having a sense of political stakes that are always deeply resonant in the practice of research and writing.
That isn’t necessarily explicit. And, you know, the question of the intramural is also a question about code. There’s something fun to me about moving to mud now. But doing it alongside this art project, that’s thinking through other modes of circulation—you know, podcasts and comics and visual art that’s coming out of the project—being in multiple spaces confirms, in different ways, my deep commitment to Black and trans survival. And I don’t think that that’s a small thing. I think it’s a huge stake to say that that’s what your life’s about.
NMBJ: Thank you so much for your generous thoughts!
Noura mutima Brock-Jaber is a multimedia poet who loves experimenting. Using language and visuals, she explores, develops, and reimagines power, agency, and identity. Belladonna* and Glass Poetry Press have published her chapbooks, and her poems have been published online and in print via DIAGRAM, The Poetry Project, and others. You can find more of her interviews published by The Adroit Journal and learn more about her work on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lady_wednesday.