Abstract
While not immediately sharing any phonetic similarity, the term shoal, foregrounding the abstract ghost-like figure on the front cover, conjures up the word “ghoul” in the reader’s imaginary. The artwork, done by artist Charmaine Lurch depicting Sycorax, was an apropo choice to underlie the sangam of Black and Native studies that Tiffany Letahbo King proposes in her book. Lurch’s depiction of Sycorax on the front cover of the book is a reinterpretation of Caliban’s mother, the main character of Shakespear’s The Tempest. Evidently, this comes off as part of King’s musing, as a postcolonial interpretation of the play has served as an analogy for conquest in the Americas. Black Shoals in itself is a retelling of encounters. Through creative prose rife with metaphors and engaged cultural analysis, King recedes the tide of western humanism to uncover the conflux of blackness and indigeneity, bringing them together on their own, through the recovered worlds of historically submerged subjectivities.
The Black Shoals is simultaneously about encounters and disassemblages. King deploys the shoal (a geological site on the shore) as hermeneutics to pull out the currents of resistance found when reading Black and Indigenous ontology against the obfuscating violence of western humanism. King’s landscape clears terrain for Black and Indigenous people to build a dialogical plane through affective practices. Situated within the broader epistemic turn of encounters in postmodernism, this project explores how Black culture, aesthetics, and beingness in relation to indigeneity unsettle the universalizing project of modernity and the haunting abstract violence that continues to play itself out in the contemporary moment. Through this, King finds a seat at the table of provocations and meditations in thinking on Blackness within conquered landscapes. Painting a confluence of territorial/geological formations as metaphors for theoretical paradigms, King brings together the interconnectedness of Black and Native studies, engaging with cultural texts, aesthetics, and other themes to rethink [or rescue] the human. In the same period of Black and Native engagements, constituting logics of modernity are defaced and unsettled. One of its central concepts, the human, King argues, comes at the expense of Black and Indigenous subjectivity as they become separate sites of violence for the ascendancy of whiteness. The conflux of Blackness and indigeneity inherently pushes back against ontological formulations behind whiteness, as their assemblages produce respective projects of abolition and decolonization. In this way, King argues, the very recognition of Blackness and indigeneity becomes an upheaval against modernity.
King draws upon several interrelated conjunctural moments and epochs, amplifying the deconstruction of modernity and humanity, while situating her work within the growing study of neoliberal modern violence. It is here where she finds the origin of the violent hauntings of modernity that continue to play out and why this book is so valuable. Taking up a transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary approach, King’s work ultimately deconstructs normative methodologies and discursive practices, deploying the metaphor of the shoal in a multitude of ways to meditate on certain encounters and desencuentros across disciplines including culture and geography. King takes up the difficult endeavor of bringing fields together—Black and Native Studies— to disrupt the rigidly demarcated and defined paradigm that is US ethnic studies. The shoal, serves as a metaphor for this project that upsets “the normative flows of western thought” (p. 2). Relying on a multitude of affective and cultural realms, including aesthetics, thought, lived experiences, and movements, Blackness is here brought to shore, pulled in from its navigation across the Black Atlantic in a grounded “livingness.” Relationally, Indigenous and Native studies are comparatively uprooted from their groundedness and brought out to sea in the oft overlooked realm of fluidity found in oceanic worldviews. A polysemous metaphor, the shoal carries with it many interpretations and meanings, serving as the underlying anchor, throughway, and incubator for the confluence of Black and Native studies. As a hermeneutics, the shoal tethers together disparate elements of Blackness and indigeneity that have been fractured and dispelled through the more dominant and normative “old” and “new” world encounters.
Contributing to the critical turn of unsettling modernity and the central element of the human, King places herself in conversation with Caribbean cultural theorists like Sylvia Wynter and Jacqui Alexander to locate the manifestation of the human in the suffering of Black and Indigenous people. By including Indigenous people, not as an addendum to the dialectical framework and thinking but a central node, King rethinks and expands upon the metaphorical contradictions of subjectivity within modernity. This transcendent rupture compliments Kamau Brathwaite’s notion of “tidalectics,” moving away from the binary framework to look at both the Black and Indigenous subject in a dual antagonism with the (white) human. This inclusion is what prevents this book from taking an Afropessimist position, as King adds to the antagonistic bodies under modernity.
Tiffany Lethabo King own being embodies a shoal. Stories of resistance, histories of resilience and powerful oration have flowed through her along the way to publishing this book. Her ancestral knowledge emanates from sites of struggle and perseverance shared alongside first nation peoples. King grounds herself in place as she thinks through undercurrents of survival that have carried her to this moment in the opening pages of the book, revisiting the conversations with elders and community outside the confines of the academic institution.
Often used as a metaphor for conquest and colonization, Caliban, the half-human half-monster main character in Shakespear’s play, has been interpreted as the colonized people by many postcolonial theorists. However, Lurch’s rendering of Sycorax gives that character a unique agency preceding conquest and colonization, complimenting King’s underlying thesis—the shoal houses other possibilities on the other/under-side of modernity.
