Papers by C. Riley Snorton
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory
This essay considers how “confusion” shapes narrative strategies and understandings of the 1811 U... more This essay considers how “confusion” shapes narrative strategies and understandings of the 1811 Uprising in Louisiana and how artistic practice, performance, and amateur documentation differently refract public memory-making of the uprising and its brutal response. Here confusion also maps the relations between reenactment, the reenactors, and the practice and politics of abolitionist imagination.
AIDS and the Distribution of Crises, 2020
Queer Cats Journal of LGBTQ Studies, 2019
Author(s): McDonald, CeCe; Snorton, C. Riley | Abstract: In “Dreams/Myths/Histories: Envisioning ... more Author(s): McDonald, CeCe; Snorton, C. Riley | Abstract: In “Dreams/Myths/Histories: Envisioning More Livable World” we arrive at the duo-keynote conver- sation between the 2017 keynote speakers: C. Riley Snorton and CeCe McDonald. In their keynote conversation, Snorthon and McDonald discuss what it means to be black, trans, and unapologetic in a white violent society. They tackle a variety of topics including Afro-futurism, radical imaginaries, prison abolition, and anti-blackness both in and out the LGBTQ community.
International Journal of Communication, 2008
It is an increasingly accepted truism that media are the creation of a complex array of actors wo... more It is an increasingly accepted truism that media are the creation of a complex array of actors working to shape policies and representations alike. In the past decade, a broad coalition of groups and individuals organized under the banner of media reform have achieved prominence as one such force attempting to exert power over media. These reformers have targeted ownership policies that have, they charge, privileged profit over quality, allowing large media corporations to blossom while sacrificing original, creative, and useful content. Advocates of media reform have crossed Left-Right divides and provided, perhaps, the most tangible political outlet for communication scholars in the history of the field, directly applying wisdom from the academy to the “real-world” of policy.
Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International, 2013
[A] beginning immediately establishes relationships with works already existing, relationships of... more [A] beginning immediately establishes relationships with works already existing, relationships of either continuity or antagonism or some mixture of both. But the moment we start to detail the features of a beginning—a moment likely to occur in examining many sorts of writers—we necessarily make certain special distinctions. Is a beginning the same as an origin?. . . . Of what value, for critical or methodological or even historical analysis is, “the beginning”? By what sort of approach, with what kind of language, with what sort of instruments does a beginning offer itself up as a subject for study? —Edward Saïd, Beginnings: Intention and Method
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2019
Abstract:This GLQ forum celebrates the twentieth-anniversary publication of Cathy Cohen's &qu... more Abstract:This GLQ forum celebrates the twentieth-anniversary publication of Cathy Cohen's "Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?" The forum opens with Cohen's reflection on the article she wrote twenty years ago. Other authors in the forum then ruminate on such topics as the potential erasure of the queer political history that the original article provoked readers to consider in the time during and since its printing, the haunting answer to the original article's haunting subtitular question—"the radical potential of queer politics?," and new political alliances that might fit under the rubric of queer in our contemporary moment.
Black on Both Sides, 2017
In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and ... more In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable.
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2018
“Trans*historicities: A Roundtable Discussion” offers reflections on how thinking about time and ... more “Trans*historicities: A Roundtable Discussion” offers reflections on how thinking about time and chronology has impacted scholarship in trans studies in recent years. Contributing scholars come from numerous disciplines that touch on history, and have expertise in far-ranging geographic and temporal fields. As a broad conversation about some of the potential possibilities and difficulties in seeking out—and finding—trans in historical contexts, this discussion focuses on the complex interrelations between trans, time, and history.
TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, 2017
International Journal of Communication, Dec 23, 2008
Elaborating on some of Edward Said's key theories on writing, this paper interrogates the histori... more Elaborating on some of Edward Said's key theories on writing, this paper interrogates the historical periodizations that serve to constitute communication and antecedents of media reform. Critically examining the concept "critical juncture," a term utilized by Robert McChesney to describe a transformative moment in the history of communication in the United States, this paper explores the relationships between and among deployments of history, claims to democracy, and processes of agenda-setting in the media reform movement. I argue that many characterizations of communication, and the crucial historical moments that constitute it remain fundamentally partial in order to derive a necessary rhetorical force to support a media reform agenda that takes U.S. national policy as its primary focus. Particularly attentive to U.S. black racial formation and activism in the late 19 th to late 20 th centuries, this paper examines what may be some "critical disjunctures" between Africana studies and communication, racial justice and media reform. I first examine each of McChesney's critical junctures, paying particular attention to the specific sociohistorical processes that shape and construct black racial identities during these times. The second part of the paper considers the values of historical claims in the service of positioning democracy as a progressive social project in the United States. I conclude by offering several epistemological and practical changes that might serve to incorporate racial justice models in the media reform movement.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 2015
Souls, 2014
As a symptom, the question “who's out in hip hop” evidences a set of logics about race, sexua... more As a symptom, the question “who's out in hip hop” evidences a set of logics about race, sexuality, and visibility, which this article examines in relation to a series of news reports about the “first (mainstream) gay rapper” in 2012. Elaborating on Richard Iton's concern over the violently public ways black life is experienced, this article attends to how certain hip hop artists—hailed as the “first gay rapper”—navigate sexual publicity for techniques that may be instructive for temporarily remediating the endemic problem of blackness, as an always publicly experienced phenomenon.
See link: https://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/oped/11/20/transgender-day-of-remembrance/
W e are in a time labeled the " transgender tipping point, " a period characterized by the scalin... more W e are in a time labeled the " transgender tipping point, " a period characterized by the scaling up of legal protections, visibility, rights, and politics centered on transgender people. The contemporary visual landscape is populated with the bodies of Black women. How does the language and discourse of the tipping point elide the presence of a saturation of Black bodies? In academia this elision has taken the shape of the expansion and institutionalization of trans-gender studies as a discipline. We are interested in what happens to the category of transgender as it becomes routed through the logics and power lines of institu-tionality and the metrics of administration. This special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly is the product and process of our attempt to think through how the institutionalization of transgender studies as a discipline functions as a scene of subjection for blackness —for Black people and places. We have engaged multiple fields in this issue, and these various intellectual quandaries all signal the simultaneous institutionalization of transgender studies alongside the heightened visibility of transgender people in our current popular and political landscapes. We are interested in the ways that these two simultaneous occurrences affect one another. Black transwomen and transwomen of color have sparked the interests of many because of popular figures like Laverne Cox and Janet Mock; at the same time, there has also been a lot more awareness around Black transwomen's relationship to premature death. Though the popular representation of fabulousness and the crises of the trans subject are represented primarily by Black transwomen and transwomen of color, the field of transgender studies, like other fields, seems to use this Black subject as a springboard to move toward other things, presumably white things.
Co-authored with Jin Haritaworn in The Transgender Studies Reader, 2nd Edition. Eds. Susan Stryke... more Co-authored with Jin Haritaworn in The Transgender Studies Reader, 2nd Edition. Eds. Susan Stryker and Aren Aizura. New York: Routledge, 2013.
As a symptom, the question "who's out in hip hop" evidences a set of logics about race, sexuality... more As a symptom, the question "who's out in hip hop" evidences a set of logics about race, sexuality, and visibility, which this article examines in relation to a series of news reports about the "first (mainstream) gay rapper" in 2012. Elaborating on Richard Iton's concern over the violently public ways black life is experienced, this article attends to how certain hip hop artists--hailed as the 'first gay rapper'--navigate sexual publicity for techniques that may be instructive for temporarily remediating the endemic problem of blackness, as an always publicly experienced phenomenon. [Click the link to download the article for free until June 2015.]
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Papers by C. Riley Snorton
Controversies involving race and the art world are often discussed in terms of diversity and representation—as if having the right representative from a group or a larger plurality of embodied difference would absolve art institutions from historic forms of exclusion. This book offers another approach, taking into account not only questions of racial representation but also issues of structural change and the redistribution of resources. In essays, conversations, discussions, and artist portfolios, contributors confront in new ways questions at the intersection of art, race, and representation.
The book uses saturation as an organizing concept, in part to suggest that current paradigms cannot encompass the complex realities of race. Saturation provides avenues to situate race as it relates to perception, science, aesthetics, the corporeal, and the sonic. In color theory, saturation is understood in terms of the degree to which a color differs from whiteness. In science, saturation points describe not only the moment in which race exceeds legibility, but also how diversity operates for institutions. Contributors consider how racialization, globalization, and the production and consumption of art converge in the art market, engaging such topics as racial capitalism, the aesthetics of colonialism, and disability cultures. They examine methods for theorizing race and representation, including “aboutness,” which interprets artworks by racialized subjects as being “about” race; modes of unruly, decolonized, and queer visual practices that resist disciplinary boundaries; and a model by which to think with and alongside blackness and indigeneity.