The Black Shoals

"Tiffany Lethabo King's concept of the shoal breaks new ground for thinking through the relationships between Indigenous peoples and African Americans and genocide and slavery as well as how they have formed our contemporary politics. Her rigorous engagement with Black and Indigenous studies will create a better dialogue between the two fields." — Mishauna Goeman, author of Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations

“In this innovative contribution to both Black and Native studies, Tiffany Lethabo King dares to think the simultaneously distinct yet edgeless relationship between Blackness and Indigeneity. It's the geological formation of the shoal—that zone just offshore, neither land (often reductively linked to the Native) nor sea (often reductively linked to the Black)—that allows King to pull off this ethical project. Indeed, The Black Shoals is Black ethics, where the ethical emerges as that distinct, ever-developing gathering of Black and Native life under shared conditions of settler terror.” — J. Kameron Carter, Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University

"If I were teaching a grad seminar in the fall I would include both The Black Shoals by Tiffany Lethabo King and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman. I hope you will too." — Christina Sharpe, via Twitter

“King’s scholarship represents a masterful mix of precision and sensitivity in describing the historical Native anti-blackness, as well as the historical cooperation between Africans and the European settlers King identifies as ‘conquistador humans,’ in dispossessing Natives of their land.”