Beyond

Abstract Black trans as an epistemology, an analytic, a poetic, signals a world beyond. Thinking through a Black trans beyond—metaphysically, and subsequently as imbued spatially through praxes—as an otherwise elsewhere, the author builds upon and furthers conceptions of Blackness’s refusal and fugitivity toward a Black trans beyond where flying/flight beyond is prerogative, a flying toward an away in disconsideration of white(cishet)ness and its logics. Demonstrative of the beyond of Black trans feeling, thinking, praxes, and imagining, Tourmaline’s Summer Azure (2020), a Black trans cultural production and an expression of the Black radical visual tradition, signifies ethical world(un)making beyond in which people fly because they are free, not to be free. Experimenting with narrative, academic prose, and Black trans cultural production as insurgent praxes signaling a Black trans beyond, this article investigates glimpses and shadowing toward beyonds, ethical in their (un)making, whose “demonic nongrounds,” building upon a concept of Black geographic thought from Katherine McKittrick and Marquis Bey’s riff on it, are worlds within/of an expanse unknown; presenced, but not here.