Moving across an eclectic historical archive and within multiple fields of study, Black on Both Sides is a beautifully interdisciplinary effort to bring blackness and transness “into the same frame” to show how these categories develop with and through one another (6). Its preface situates the book in the context of ongoing black and trans death, and the chapters that follow work to imagine and enact more possibilities for black and trans life. Positioned in part as an intervention into trans studies just as the institutionalization of that field takes hold, the book demonstrates the profound failings of additive models that would stop at a “‘shadow history’ of blackness in trans studies” (xiv). Instead, drawing on Hortense Spillers, Snorton shows how the ungendering and fungibility of blackness through slavery created conditions for gender to be unsettled and understood as changeable, and he follows the effects of those conditions into the present day.

This approach is made clear from the first chapter, which focusses on American gynecologist J. Marion Sims's violent medical experiments on enslaved women in the mid-nineteenth century. Analyzing a broad archive of materials, including Sims's own records, published illustrations of his work, and narratives of his career, Snorton shows how the designation of enslaved black bodies as interchangeable facilitated the medical construction of “sex.” This chapter also exemplifies a key aspect of Snorton's approach throughout, which is not one of simply recuperating lost or forgotten black trans identities and individuals, but of tracing the racialized conditions through which a concept of transness can gain traction. Though careful to attend to the material realities of those persons addressed in the archives, the book as a whole is concerned less with black and trans people per se than with the categories themselves and the structures of power that contextualize them.

Additionally, medicine's search for legibility (with Sims's experiments as one example) forms part of the backdrop for Snorton's claim to the book's “right to opacity” (11). The writing style, often quite dense and circuitous, enacts the book's larger political project by refusing demands for clarity or stability. Thus the writing, as well as the archival materials, frequently (and sometimes explicitly) denies readers a complete answer or a transparent truth as the book rewrites and rethinks long-held truths that have solidified through powerful institutions ranging from medicine to slavery to journalism. Alongside this, Snorton considers the ethical stance necessary for engaging such archives; in attending to the “transitive” throughout, the book foregrounds the shifting and impermanent nature of the archival materials as well as that of “black” and “trans” as categories, and of black and trans lives themselves. This is also one reason why, despite its subtitle, the book does not offer a standard historical narrative but a “set of political propositions, theories of history, and writerly experiments” (6). In both its style and content, then, Black on Both Sides works to “exceed capture” and to make opacity generative (11).

For readers less familiar with the many fields and theoretical frames threaded together here, however, this same quality may make the text a difficult one to engage, even as Snorton shows how that difficulty is a crucial part of the book's overall project. In many cases, the specificity of the archival materials helps ground Snorton's analysis and offers balance against the dense writing. The book's final section – consisting of a chapter repositioning Christine Jorgensen's story in the context of narratives of black trans embodiment during the same period and a chapter centering Philip DeVine in what is commonly known in trans studies as “the Brandon [Teena] archive” – may be most approachable for newer readers. This section deals quite openly with the difficulties of language and narrative, following the other chapters in seeking new possibilities within the historical gaps and omissions so often taken for granted. In doing so, the final section opens generative questions not only about these two particular archives that hold such cachet in trans studies, but also about the broader project and possibilities of trans studies itself. Following the mutually informing genealogies of blackness and transness across a wide-ranging archive, Black on Both Sides challenges black studies and trans studies – as well as several other intertwined fields – to think more expansively with one another, imagining, tracing, and creating the conditions for black and trans life.