In this talk, C. Riley Snorton explores trans ecological practices of becoming in territories defined as hostile environments for human life. In close engagement with the films, Uyra: The Rising Forest (Dir. Curi, 2022), an experimental documentary set in the Amazon forest and the northern Brazilian municipality of Manaus, and Neptune Frost (Dirs. Uzeyman and Williams, 2022), an Afrofuturist musical set in a coltan mining site and an e-waste dump in the hilltops of Burundi, Snorton traces a mycorrhizal network among “pioneer species” plant life and people across the racial capitalocene. Moving through questions of form and aesthetics, social and ecological constructions of difference, and matters of praxis in both films, this talk dwells with the pedagogical life of plants and the motility of peripheries.

This event is part of the Denbo Center for Humanities & the Arts' 2025-26 Distinguished Lecture Series. 

C. Riley Snorton is professor of English and Comparative Literature and jointly appointed with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University. He is the author of Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (2017) and Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (2014). Snorton is also the co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art, and the Circulation of Value (2020) and The Flesh of the Matter: A Critical Forum on Hortense Spillers (2024). A Black Queer History of the United States, which Snorton co-authored with Darius Bost, is scheduled for release in January 2026.