On February 25, 2026, the Program in Comparative Literature at Rutgers University hosted Professor Daniel da Silva from the Department of Spanish and Portuguese for a talk in the Comparative Literature Faculty Lecture Series titled “Trans Tessituras & the Queer Arrangements of Listening in Difference,” which was based on and as an introduction for his forthcoming book Trans Tessituras: Queer Repertoires and Black Diaspora in Lusophone Popular Music. The event was hybrid and brought together faculty members, graduate students, and attendees both in-person and virtually to explore questions of sound studies and queer cultural production across Lusophone contexts.
Drawing on artists from Brazil, Portugal, and Angola, Professor da Silva introduced the concept of “Trans Tessituras,” a framework for understanding dissident formations of Lusophone popular music and their embodied, affective registers of expression. He explored how queer sonic practices move across gendered, cultural, and geopolitical boundaries in transatlantic Lusophone worlds. Through this approach, the lecture proposed a “wily musicology” attentive to attunement, arrangement, transposition, and resonance, and in queer diasporic soundscapes.