The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies

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.

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• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval
• Empire's Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (American Crossroads Book 52)
• Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination
• Queer Times, Black Futures (Sexual Cultures Book 30)
• Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory
• Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands
• Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle
• Racial Ecologies