(Partner Event) Epistemic Dissonance: Trans*lating Across the Black Atlantic

Join Dr. Tanya Saunders and the translators from Brazil for this event.  The program centers around the launch of two books, Bondage: Anti-Blackness and Ancestrality and Epistemic Dissonance: The (R)existence of Black Travestis and Trans Women in Brazil.

In Bondage, Osmundo Pinho makes an important contribution to Black Studies transnationally through placing Afro-pessimism in conversation with “Ancestrality,” an important theoretical concept emerging from the field of Black Studies in Brazil. In the book, Pinho argues that social death and ancestry coexist, are in tension, and are both transformations. In the case of Pinho’s work, which some scholars have referred to as "Afro-optimism", the author both  recognizes social death, but he also recognizes black life, lived in relation to ancestry, and offers a framework through which black liberation can be realized.

Epistemic Dissonance is a much needed and truly groundbreaking anthology: it is one of the first academic publications that centers the histories and intellectual contributions of Travestis and Trans Women scholars and activists from Latin America. Through centering Brazil, Epistemic Dissonance introduces the reader to the interventions that Travestis and Trans Women are making in envisioning, (re)thinking and theorizing social change. The authors challenge their various marginalizations while living and affirming new modes of existence which encourages everyone not only to resist, but to (R)exist.