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 and 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.

Daniel da Silva is Assistant Professor of Portuguese at Rutgers University–New Brunswick.

Acknowledgments  ix
Prelude  xi
Introduction  1
First Movement. Confounding
1. An Abundant Drag  27
2. Of Gods, Monsters, and Travestis  47
3. Queer Cacophony  69
Second Movement. Unbearable
4. Unbearable Fadistas  91
5. Fado as Queer Praxis  109
Third Movement. Black
6. Angolan Trans Formations  129
7. Waking Diaspora  153
Coda: Lisbon Is Burning  171
Notes  177
Bibliography  199
Index