Critical Ethnic Studies Committee: Roundtable on Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies

Session Submission Type: Experimental Session

Abstract

Tiffany Lethabo King’s powerful, much-anticipated book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019) illuminates the entanglements of Black and Native studies by activating Black studies’ potential to critique the imbrications of slavery, anti-blackness, conquest and genocide. Grounded in the embodied politics of Black and Native feminisms, King pushes back against binary formations of native/settler that have emerged in iterations of (white) settler colonial studies, bringing a relational method to bear across sites ranging from Black and Indigenous film, literature, and sculpture, 18th century cartography, and 21st century direct action protest. Guided by the critical hermeneutic of the shoal—the mound of submerged sand that sits below the surface of the water, bridging the edges of land and sea—King reveals the “edgelessness” of the violence of slavery and genocide, and in so doing,fleshes out the theory and methods needed for the project of decolonization/abolition. This session, which brings King together in conversation with interdisciplinary scholars working across Black, Indigenous and gender and sexuality studies, will examine the critical questions and possibilities cleaved open by The Black Shoals for contending with the ongoing violence of anti-blackness, settler colonialism and heteropatriarchy. Roundtable participants will offer comments and Tiffany King will provide a response, after which the conversation will open to the audience.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association 2020

Chair

• Beenash Jafri, University of California-Davis

Panelists

• Stephanie A Lumsden, University of California-Los Angeles

• Karyn Recollet, University of Toronto

• Megan Scribe, Ryerson University

• Savannah Shange, University of California-Santa Cruz

Comment

• Tiffany Lethabo King, University of Virginia