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.”

“King’s book is an important participant in a small but growing scholarly movement seeking to understand and unravel the logics of settler colonialism and conquest by breaking down scholarly silos between groups that frequently interacted and interact. Moreover, what King has so well begun can be built on by other scholars.” - Laura Goldblatt, Lateral

“Tiffany King’s poetic and theoretically compelling text is both an invitation and disturbance, or a provocation to be unmoored, to be thrown into chaos and to place one’s feet at the shoal of something other than traditional (normative) notions of sovereignty, nation, and citizenship.” - Shanya Cordis, GLQ

“A multivocal, wide-ranging, inter-disciplinary project, . . . Tiffany Lethabo King’s book is both timely and prescient. . . . For those who would like to explore Black and Indigenous thought, especially the conceptual and methodological overlaps between the two fields, this book is an exceptional primer.” - Michael J. Kennedy, The Black Scholar

“The Black Shoals offers a rich analysis of how scholars, activists, and art­ists have contended with conquest, conquistador-settler epistemologies, and Black-Native relations. . . . King’s ‘shoal’ offers an analytic through which to theorize what ethical and sus­tained exchanges between Black studies and Native studies might look like.” - Mary McNeil, Native American and Indigenous Studies