The University of Arizona Press
Date: Wednesday, February 28, 2024
Time: 4:30 – 6:30 p.m., EST
Where: Paul Cadario Conference Centre, University of Toronto, 1 Devonshire Pl, Toronto, ON
Alan Pelaez Lopez, editor of When Language Broke Open: An Anthology of Queer and Trans Black Writers of Latin American Descent will give a lecture at the University of Toronto titled, “Rehearsals and Refusal: notes on the trans* imagination.” The lecture weaves North American Indigenous epistemologies with Black trans* theory to think about who we might be outside settler nations, genders, and sexualities. Pelaez Lopez says, “I talk through the radical activism of undocumented / illegalized trans* migrants in the United States to argue that the imagination is the first thing that empires take from us when we cross settler border.” The event is presented by the Mark S. Bonham Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies, and is free and open to the public. (Note: As of Feburary 27, 2024, this event is sold out).
About the book:
When Language Broke Open collects the creative offerings of forty-five queer and trans Black writers of Latin American descent who use poetry, prose, and visual art to illustrate Blackness as a geopolitical experience that is always changing. Telling stories of Black Latinidades, this anthology centers the multifaceted realities of the LGBTQ community.
By exploring themes of memory, care, and futurity, these contributions expand understandings of Blackness in Latin America, the Caribbean, and their U.S.-based diasporas. The volume offers up three central questions: How do queer and/or trans Black writers of Latin American descent address memory? What are the textures of caring, being cared for, and accepting care as Black queer and/or trans people of Latin American descent? And how do queer and trans embodiments help us understand and/or question the past and the present, and construct a Black, queer, and trans future?
