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 Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University.

Preface  ix Acknowledgments  xvii Introduction: The Black Shoals  1 1. Errant Grammars: Defacing the Ceremony  36 2. The Map (Settlement) and the Territory (The Incompleteness of Conquest)  74 3. At the Pores of the Plantation  111 4. Our Cherokee Uncles: Black and Native Erotics  141 5. A Ceremony for Sycorax  175 Epilogue: Of Water and Land  207 Notes  211 Bibliography  263 Index 277