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Abstract
In her recent book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, 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.
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Tiffany King is Associate Professor of African-American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. Her research is situated at intersections of slavery and indigenous genocide in the Americas. King’s book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019) argues that scholarly traditions within Black Studies that examine Indigenous genocide alongside slavery in the Americas have forged ethical and generative engagements with Native Studies—and Native thought—that continue to reinvent the political imaginaries of abolition and decolonization. King is also co-editor of an anthology titled Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism (Duke University Press 2020). This collection of essays features leading scholars in the fields of Black and Indigenous Studies in order to stage a conversation between Black and Indigenous thought and politics on “otherwise” terms that are less mediated by conquest and settler-colonial logics.
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