The Black Shoals
In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.
Tiffany Lethabo King is an associate professor in the African-American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies Departments at Georgia State University. Her research focuses on the intersectionality of slavery and indigenous genocide in the Americas.
Other publications from this author include:
- “Black ‘Feminisms’ and Pessimism: Abolishing Moynihan’s Negro Family” in Theory & Event, 21 (1), 68-87 (2018)
- “Racial Ecologies: Black Landscapes in Flux” in Racial Ecologies (2018)
- “Racial Ecologies: Black Landscapes in Flux” in Racial Ecologies (2018)
- “New World Grammars: The ‘Unthought’ Black Discourses of Conquest” in Theory and Event, 19 (4) (2016)
- “The Labor of (re)Reading Plantation Landscapes Fungible(ly)” in Antipode, 1-18 (2016)