The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies

Abstract

A multivocal, wide-ranging, inter-disciplinary project, Tiffany Lethabo King’s The Black Shoals is a conversation that entwines the traditions and discourse of Black abolition and Native decolonization, confronting the genocide and dispossession endemic to European epistemologies and ontologies that continue to subtend academic study writ large and every facet of the West’s socio-economic infrastructure. Both a methodology and a metaphorical neologism playing off of the polysemic nature of the word, the shoal for King, “interrupts and slows themomentum of long-standing...modes and itineraries for theorizing New World violence, social relations, Indigeneity, and Blackness in the Western hemisphere” (2). The shoal acts as a verb and a noun to obstruct the inertia of European epistemology (noun) and reroute (verb) the flows of thought (posthumanism, new materialism, neo-Marxism) currently having a moment across academia and “the studies” (Black studies, queer studies, disability studies, women’s and gender studies). Geologically, the shoal is defined as a naturally forming and partially submerged sandbar near the shores of any other body of water. It is, as King describes, “an accumulation of granular materials (sand, rock, and other materials) that through sedimentation create a... barrier that is difficult to pass” (2). It has also historically been understood, dating back to the eighteenth century, as a verb to “describe how a ship or vessel slows down to navigate a rocky or rough seabed” (3). King’s thesis is that Black and Indigenous thought function as the shoals to “disrupt the movement of modern thought” (11) premised on Enlightenment ideology. She argues that the Western intellectual tradition was constituted by and constitutive of slavery and genocide, and in order to “enable something else to form” (11), that is, divergent ways of being, moving, and speaking that make visible European theory and grammar’s disavowal of its genocidal origin, a transversal re-engagement with Black and Indigenous thought is necessary. In particular, she places Black and Indigenous literary traditions next to each other, noting where novel, disruptive discursive spaces open up—spaces that not only interrupt but reinvent the mytho-poetics of the Enlightenment. Across an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue, King puts the works of Sylvia Wynter, Frank Wilderson, C. L. R. James, Leslie Silko, and many others into conversation to argue that “conquistador humanism”—the name King gives to the system of thought coming out of Christopher Columbus’ massacre of Indigenous peoples and the inception of the Transatlantic Slave Trade—established the “white, European male” as the human par excellence and all remaining bodies as “Other” and “animalistic.” Such conceptions of the human still influence contemporary modes of thinking, to the detriment of both Black studies and