The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King Mary McNeil (bio) The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King Duke University Press, 2019 IN THE BLACK SHOALS, Tiffany Lethabo King argues that although the transatlantic slave trade and Indigenous genocide are distinct phenomena within a larger violent "conquistador-settler" project, they "can never be bracketed . . . from one another" (xi, 200–201). Leading from this argument, King theorizes Black and Indigenous radical possibilities as co-constitutive, asserting that "the most radical of Black and Indigenous projects—abolition and decolonization—exceed the horizons of freedom currently imagined by a White leftist imaginary and discourses of settler colonialism" (208). Thus, King troubles Western epistemologies by staging a "multivoiced conversation" between Black studies and Native American and Indigenous studies (xiii). In order to grapple with Western constructions of the "human" as an ontological category that excludes Blackness and Indigeneity, King grounds The Black Shoals in the works of Black studies scholars such as Frank Wilderson, Sylvia Wynter, and Hortense Spillers. The Black Shoals is also heavily informed by analytics from the subfields of Caribbean and Black Canadian studies. Of particular significance are Kamau Brathwaite's "tidalectics," Édouard Glissant's "errantry," and Katherine McKittrick's "black Atlantic livingness," which challenge colonial models of rootedness, exile, and value. Next, King stages a conversation between Black studies and Native studies in order to "trace the contours of a shared speech" of conquest (21). Finally, King critiques the limited grammars that white-dominated knowledge fields use in conceptualizing genocide and slavery. This is the theoretical foundation upon which King analyzes cultural production. King's book is anchored by the analytic of the shoal. An ever-changing space where ocean and land meet just beyond the shore, King uses the shoal as a metaphor to describe the "liminal, indeterminate, and hard to map" conceptual space where Black studies and Native studies might be able to engage with one another on their own terms (3). King also conceives of the shoal in active terms, drawing upon the use of "shoal" as a verb that describes a ship's navigation of shallow and rocky terrain near a coast. To "shoal" is to carefully navigate a space that resists definite mapping. Thus, shoaling necessitates the careful creation of new language to describe the [End Page 152] interconnectedness of Black and Indigenous experiences of conquest, genocide, and slavery. While the first two chapters of The Black Shoals primarily critique conquistador-settler epistemologies, the latter three attend to the ways in which cultural producers imagine other possibilities for Black and Native people. Chapters 1 and 2 analyze the 2015 defacing of Boston's Christopher Columbus statue with red paint and a Black Lives Matter tag; Toni Morrison, Junot Díaz, and Leslie Marmon Silko's meditations on conquest; William Gerard de Brahm's "1757 Map of the Coast of South Carolina and Parts of Georgia"; and the correspondence of enslaver Eliza Lucas Pinckney. In looking at these disparate objects, King makes three primary arguments. First, King argues that a shared grammar of conquest is most apt in conceptualizing Native genocide and Black enslavement. Second, King critiques settler-colonial studies' framing of settler-colonialism as a "land-centered" rather than "genocide-centered" project, arguing that such framing obscures settler-colonialism's inherent violence (69). Third, King asserts that while the conquistador-settler marshaled cartography as a tool through which to rationalize the "crafting and sustaining of European human life and self-actualization through Black and Indigenous death," eighteenth-century maps and correspondence reveal the limits and anxieties of "conquistador humanism" (84). In the last three chapters, King returns to de Brahm's map and attends to four new cultural objects: Julie Dash's film, Daughters of the Dust; the film's literary sequel; Tiya Miles's novel, The Cherokee Rose; and Charmaine Lurch's sculpture, Revisiting Sycorax. King employs analytics of porosity, fugitivity, fungibility, erotics, and ceremony to analyze the ways that these artists imagine other possibilities for Black and Native people. Such possibilities are rooted in a disruption of labor as the "governing frame . . . for understanding Black embodiment on plantation...