BOOK REVIEW Transcending Disciplinary Boundaries KWAME HOLMES Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity C. Riley Snorton Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. 272 pp. Early on in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, C. Riley Snorton tells readers, “Black on Both Sides is not a history per se, so much as it is a set of political propositions, theories of history and writerly experiments.” (6) I found Snorton’s intentional disruption of our assumptions about what constitutes “a history” —a disruption that continues throughout the text—an apt analogy for the book’s theoretical interventions. Trans bodies are most vulnerable to violence when they disrupt our (cis) demands that gender presentation and physical sex provide a mutually constitutive mirror for each other. Snorton’s pathbreak- ing book, though, cares little for our comfort and asks us to sit within the paradox produced by any attempt to conceptually and discretely apprehend histories of blackness/transness, categories which, he asserts and documents, represent conditions of possibility rather than static states of being. Rather than a “history,” Black on Both Sides is a piece of critical theory that positions blackness and transness as “appositional,” or as terms which can refer to one another. For Snorton, the concept of “transitivity” refers to transness as (and here he quotes Claire Colebrook) “a not-yet differentiated singularity from which distinct genders, races[s], species, sexes, and sexualities are generated” and blackness (and here he references Hortense Spillers and the Afropessimism lit- erature) as “a condition of possibility for the modern world” and an articulation of “the paradox of nonbeing, as expressed in its deployment of appositional flesh” (5). Snorton draws significant inspiration from surrealist French philosophy, long concerned with pushing past both the totalizing taxonomy of Marxism and the hyperindividuation (and inevitability) of psychoanalytic theory in order to TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly * Volume 6, Number 2 * May 2019 274 DOI 10.1215/23289252-7348594 ª 2019 Duke University Press Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/tsq/article-pdf/6/2/274/567116/274holmes.pdf by UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO BOULDER user on 18 May 2019