Trans*-itional Longings of the “Dark Ghetto”: Rosa Guy and a Trans* Black Childhood Studies

Abstract

Abstract: “Trans*-itional Longings” argues that the neglected Black Arts Movement writer Rosa Guy traces out a model of trans* Black childhood in her essays and fiction that is informed by the materiality and lived experience of antiblack necropolitics in “ghetto” ecologies. Guy offers a different entry point and genealogy for a “quared” Black childhood studies that is more than an extension of white queer childhood studies. In her essays and fiction, Guy witnesses that the trans* Black child of Harlem is a figure of improvisational Black aliveness “trans-itioning” into alternative Black futures.