Transounding (Listening for Black Queer Lusophone Diasporas)

In Transounding, Daniel da Silva examines the work of popular music artists from Portugal, Brazil, and Angola whose singing and performances blur boundaries of gender and genre. These artists engage in collaborations that traverse uneven, transatlantic, Lusophone geographies and complicate North-South and South-South axes, composing, expressing, and performing modes of musical and affective political bonds across Luso-Afro-Brazilian cultures, transposing hegemonic cultural narratives into sites of Black queer and transfeminine possibility. Silva describes how transfeminine Brazilian artists complicate categories of gender and sexuality; how queer Portuguese fado performers inhabit and transform the genre's gendered conventions; and how queer, trans, and travesti Angolan and Lisbon-based Black queer artists produce resistant expressions within and against postcolonial and anti-Black contexts. Transounding traces queerness, Blackness, and diaspora across popular culture forms in the Lusophone world and explores the fundamental question of what listeners hear when transgressive voices sing.