If you’ve been listening to this podcast these past eight years, you know that we always do our interviews “in house,” as we value the moment of the recorded conversation as well as the encounter with someone’s work and personality. Rules are made to have exceptions however, and today we are happy to introduce you to a conversation between Amélie Tresfels and Michaëla Danjé around the book that Michaëla recently edited,  entitled AfroTrans. This book is the very first one published by Cases Rebelles‘ newly created publishing house. With this new endeavor, the panafrorevolutionary collective co-founded by Michaëla, continues to inspire many of us around the world as the planetary dimension of the book’s orders have shown. If you’d like to read from Cases Rebelles on The Funambulist, you can find their two texts for the magazine: “Unquiet Imaginaries of Black Resistance” in The Funambulist 27 and “Revolutionary Reparations” in our 30th issue on “Reparations.”

In this conversation, Amélie asks Michaëla about AfroTrans, which gathers essays, interviews, poetry, and fictions by Black trans women, men, and non-binary persons, from and about their lived experience, in a resolutely political approach but without ever essentializing trans identities. They also talk about collective creation, Black resistance, the importance of language and, crucially, love.

Michaëla Danjé is Afro Caribbean. She is a rapper, a beatmaker, a writer, a documentarist filmmaker, and she is an activist and member of the Cases Rebelles collective that she co-founded. Her essay “Négritudes spectaculaires” is due for publication at the end of 2021 at Cases Rebelles Editions.

Amélie Tresfels is a journalist. Her contributions feature interviews with activists, artists and researchers on topics related to gender, sexuality, race and prison abolition. She is currently working on a French translation of Carceral Humanitarianism: Logics of Refugee Detention by Kelly Oliver.