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The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies
In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2019
61 people are currently reading
1101 people want to read
About the author
Tiffany Lethabo King
3 books14 followersTiffany Lethabo King is Assistant Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University.
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Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
September 24, 2019
Tiffany Lethabo King deeply engages the space at which Black Studies and Indigenous Studies meet--that is the crossroads of colonialism, genocide and slavery where enlightenment era constructions of the human render indigenous and Black folks as non-human entities: property, land to be conquered, a frontier of bodies and territory. She finds there, the pockets where Black and Indigenous organizing, erotics, and creative production meet to challenge Western civilization--the critical edge of the fields.
June 13, 2020
cannot recommend this book enough! generatively moves past the baggages of "coalition-building" and makes space for all the beautiful entanglements of Relation!!!!! fireworks !!!!
November 18, 2021
Gabriella Lott
Reading Response 3: The Black Shoals
September 17, 2021
GEOG 814: Black Geographies
In The Black Shoals, Tiffany Lethabo King explores how Black movements for abolition and Indigenous movements for decolonization can interrupt settler-conquistador flows of memory, momentum, and theory. Lethabo King defines movements very broadly, including the intimate relationships Black and Indigenous people can have with one another, as well as the conversations academics engage in to sharpen and refine their definitions of various theories. At their peak, these movement “shoals” can disrupt the operating theories about our history and our future as “humans” in the United States.
The Black Shoals introduces many helpful conceptual frameworks, including the term “conquistador-settler” to describe White people’s authoritative relationship to settler colonialism. Conversely, I think this term is the most useful in my own desire to understand the distinct, but still oppressive, ways that people of color can act as settlers and/or align with settler colonial states. While Lethabo King clearly acknowledges that “the terms of survival—or, said another way, the circumstances under which you as a Black or Indigenous person lived—were often tethered to the death of the Other”, outside of the early chapters, I think this book is more concerned with the ways Black Americans can participate in decolonial projects, and not with the ways they can uphold settler colonial projects.
However, the latter issue is one of the core topics I’d like to explore in this class, as it’s central to understanding the Black geographies created by my people: Reverse Migrators to the U.S. South. The “Reverse Migration” narrative includes people like my parents, who returned to the region my grandparents left during the Great Migration. I think the Reverse Migration narratives created by migrators and the people who study them are missing a lot of nuance and political analysis. For instance, I’ve heard many friends and family note that their DC paycheck can stretch a lot further in Charlotte. Perhaps subconsciously, this accepts the financial straits of people making a Charlotte paycheck in Charlotte, a region that has abysmal rates of upward mobility for Black families who never left. In this way, Reverse Migrators’ relative prosperity in the South is only possible because of the economic subjugation in “Black Mecca” regions like Atlanta and Charlotte. Furthermore, our relative prosperity is anchored to the oppression not only of poor Black families, but also the Catawba Nation, who are the original stewards of the subdivisions that now hold our privately-owned homes.
I want to clarify that I’m not saying I think all Reverse Migrators are settlers, as I know people are migrating with a broad range of financial motivations, familial connections, and political commitments. However, I am trying to continue last week’s discussion of how we can avoid the “imprecise binaries” applied to people in the Black Atlantic. , To borrow language from Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place, I think the challenge with this conversation is that we are trying to discuss how Black Americans can contribute to “the horror of the deed” (neocolonialism and neoliberalism) while using the “language of the criminal.” I think this is what’s most helpful about The Black Shoals—Lethabo King provides us with an alternate grammar that falls outside of the “native or tourist” binary that you see in other decolonial texts like A Small Place.
Unfortunately, by the end of the book, I didn’t find Lethabo King’s suggestions for “joint healing” ethics to be very applied. I don’t want to discredit the examples of artistic, erotic, and ceremonial ethics, which I’m sure are very helpful to readers who are sculptors, pastors, or academics. However, for an everyday resident of still-occupied territory, I’m not sure The Black Shoals ultimately shared a lot about how to be in better relationship with Indigenous people. This is partially because I felt many of the acts of solidarity that Lethabo King does reference were a bit overdrawn. While I appreciated the examples towards the end about organizing work done in Toronto, I honestly rolled my eyes at her theorizing on how a fictional Indigenous character took on the cause of Blackness (probably a poor paraphrase here) due to his romantic partnership with a Gullah woman. I know one of my problems is that I read everything as a self-help book, and need to learn to appreciate theory for what it can provide apart from any concrete application. To Lethabo King’s credit, there are some helpful conceptual frameworks (noted above) and some really useful notes about cartography and betraying archives that will be of great use to my primary academic fields (urban planning and library sciences.) However, I still felt disappointed by the introduction’s promises to explore more of the practical elements of how readers might commit to “day-to-day struggles to affirm Black and Native life.”
Bibliography
Crawley, Ashon. “He Was An Architect: Little Richard And Blackqueer Grief.” NPR, December 22, 2020, sec. Music Features. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/22/948963....
Ford, Tanisha C. “Should Black Northerners Move Back to the South?: Nonfiction.” New York Times (Online). New York: New York Times Company, March 2, 2021. 2494810917. ProQuest Central. http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url....
Gilroy, Paul, 1956-. The Black Atlantic : Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1993., 1993. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/U....
Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988., 1988. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/U....
King, Tiffany Lethabo, 1976-. The Black Shoals : Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Durham ; London : Duke University Press, 2019., 2019. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/U....
Semuels, Alana. “Why It’s So Hard to Get Ahead in the South.” The Atlantic (Online), April 4, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/....
Reading Response 3: The Black Shoals
September 17, 2021
GEOG 814: Black Geographies
In The Black Shoals, Tiffany Lethabo King explores how Black movements for abolition and Indigenous movements for decolonization can interrupt settler-conquistador flows of memory, momentum, and theory. Lethabo King defines movements very broadly, including the intimate relationships Black and Indigenous people can have with one another, as well as the conversations academics engage in to sharpen and refine their definitions of various theories. At their peak, these movement “shoals” can disrupt the operating theories about our history and our future as “humans” in the United States.
The Black Shoals introduces many helpful conceptual frameworks, including the term “conquistador-settler” to describe White people’s authoritative relationship to settler colonialism. Conversely, I think this term is the most useful in my own desire to understand the distinct, but still oppressive, ways that people of color can act as settlers and/or align with settler colonial states. While Lethabo King clearly acknowledges that “the terms of survival—or, said another way, the circumstances under which you as a Black or Indigenous person lived—were often tethered to the death of the Other”, outside of the early chapters, I think this book is more concerned with the ways Black Americans can participate in decolonial projects, and not with the ways they can uphold settler colonial projects.
However, the latter issue is one of the core topics I’d like to explore in this class, as it’s central to understanding the Black geographies created by my people: Reverse Migrators to the U.S. South. The “Reverse Migration” narrative includes people like my parents, who returned to the region my grandparents left during the Great Migration. I think the Reverse Migration narratives created by migrators and the people who study them are missing a lot of nuance and political analysis. For instance, I’ve heard many friends and family note that their DC paycheck can stretch a lot further in Charlotte. Perhaps subconsciously, this accepts the financial straits of people making a Charlotte paycheck in Charlotte, a region that has abysmal rates of upward mobility for Black families who never left. In this way, Reverse Migrators’ relative prosperity in the South is only possible because of the economic subjugation in “Black Mecca” regions like Atlanta and Charlotte. Furthermore, our relative prosperity is anchored to the oppression not only of poor Black families, but also the Catawba Nation, who are the original stewards of the subdivisions that now hold our privately-owned homes.
I want to clarify that I’m not saying I think all Reverse Migrators are settlers, as I know people are migrating with a broad range of financial motivations, familial connections, and political commitments. However, I am trying to continue last week’s discussion of how we can avoid the “imprecise binaries” applied to people in the Black Atlantic. , To borrow language from Jamaica Kincaid in A Small Place, I think the challenge with this conversation is that we are trying to discuss how Black Americans can contribute to “the horror of the deed” (neocolonialism and neoliberalism) while using the “language of the criminal.” I think this is what’s most helpful about The Black Shoals—Lethabo King provides us with an alternate grammar that falls outside of the “native or tourist” binary that you see in other decolonial texts like A Small Place.
Unfortunately, by the end of the book, I didn’t find Lethabo King’s suggestions for “joint healing” ethics to be very applied. I don’t want to discredit the examples of artistic, erotic, and ceremonial ethics, which I’m sure are very helpful to readers who are sculptors, pastors, or academics. However, for an everyday resident of still-occupied territory, I’m not sure The Black Shoals ultimately shared a lot about how to be in better relationship with Indigenous people. This is partially because I felt many of the acts of solidarity that Lethabo King does reference were a bit overdrawn. While I appreciated the examples towards the end about organizing work done in Toronto, I honestly rolled my eyes at her theorizing on how a fictional Indigenous character took on the cause of Blackness (probably a poor paraphrase here) due to his romantic partnership with a Gullah woman. I know one of my problems is that I read everything as a self-help book, and need to learn to appreciate theory for what it can provide apart from any concrete application. To Lethabo King’s credit, there are some helpful conceptual frameworks (noted above) and some really useful notes about cartography and betraying archives that will be of great use to my primary academic fields (urban planning and library sciences.) However, I still felt disappointed by the introduction’s promises to explore more of the practical elements of how readers might commit to “day-to-day struggles to affirm Black and Native life.”
Bibliography
Crawley, Ashon. “He Was An Architect: Little Richard And Blackqueer Grief.” NPR, December 22, 2020, sec. Music Features. https://www.npr.org/2020/12/22/948963....
Ford, Tanisha C. “Should Black Northerners Move Back to the South?: Nonfiction.” New York Times (Online). New York: New York Times Company, March 2, 2021. 2494810917. ProQuest Central. http://libproxy.lib.unc.edu/login?url....
Gilroy, Paul, 1956-. The Black Atlantic : Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge, Mass.: Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1993., 1993. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/U....
Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. New York: New York : Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1988., 1988. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/U....
King, Tiffany Lethabo, 1976-. The Black Shoals : Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Durham: Durham ; London : Duke University Press, 2019., 2019. https://catalog.lib.unc.edu/catalog/U....
Semuels, Alana. “Why It’s So Hard to Get Ahead in the South.” The Atlantic (Online), April 4, 2017. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/....
January 17, 2021
This was just a powerful way of bringing together Black and Native studies, and using especially the the conquistador-settler as a new lens through which to understand the extreme violence that was involved in the settlement of the north American continent, not just ideologically but also in action. King uses the work of Sylvia Wynter a great deal to interrogate how the human is constructed in the spaces she writes about, as well as Afro-pessimist thought, but she manages to make the former very clear and use the latter to push for a different kind of futurity, especially by taking up C. Riley Snorton's use of fungibility and fugitivity to create spaces for Black people to thrive, rather than having the non-human or fungibility be a stopping point.
My favorite chapter was probably "Our Cherokee Uncles: Black and Native Erotics," which manages to highlight the intimacies possible between Black and Native people, and what that means for "alliances," the futures of both people, and move through and with the sticking points that usually crop up in the conflict between Black and Native studies.
It's just such a good book, and I'm hopeful that people will be citing it a ton in the future and following the example of as we continue to grapple with working between Black and Native studies. Plus, the bibliography is really great and I have a lot more to read now!
My favorite chapter was probably "Our Cherokee Uncles: Black and Native Erotics," which manages to highlight the intimacies possible between Black and Native people, and what that means for "alliances," the futures of both people, and move through and with the sticking points that usually crop up in the conflict between Black and Native studies.
It's just such a good book, and I'm hopeful that people will be citing it a ton in the future and following the example of as we continue to grapple with working between Black and Native studies. Plus, the bibliography is really great and I have a lot more to read now!
June 23, 2025
A lovely break from the superbad books I’ve recently read. As a Black woman who has done work in a Native community this was insightful and creative. Made me think a lot about how Blackness and Indigeneity intersect when I feel like they’ve been posited as the antithesis of one another. At times hard to comprehend and abstract but worth a read
April 15, 2024
Now I know for a fact that the mfers on Twitter who keep regurgitating the same perennially asinine strawman argument against Afropessimism have never read this book 🫥
March 10, 2021
King theorizes the shoal as the place where water (the metaphor of Black studies) meets land (the metaphor of Native studies).
January 20, 2021
brilliant. brilliant.
I will be revisiting this for a while.
I will be revisiting this for a while.
August 30, 2022
Andrea Smith?!
January 2, 2026
xv ‘Throughout this book, I meditate on this place—the spot in the road, on the route home, and on the way to the familiar places that force you to slow down; the space that forces you to move from the automaton to a more alert driver and navigator. In this project, I both map and trace this geological, geographic, and oceanic place called the shoal [...] shoal that interrupts the course and momentum of the flow of critical theories about genocide, slavery, and humanity in the Western Hemisphere.’
4 ‘I offer the space of the shoal as simultaneously land and sea to fracture this notion that Black diaspora studies is overdetermined by rootlessness and only metaphorized by water and to disrupt the idea that Indigenous studies is solely rooted and fixed in imaginaries of land as territory.’
11 ‘The way that shoals slow the movement and momentum of vessels acts as the organizing metaphor that structures the theoretical frame of the book.’
22 ‘The Black Shoals therefore stages an extended rumination on the theoretical, methodological, creative, and ethical potential of Black fungibility as a way of articulating a world-altering mode of existence.’
28 ‘Materially and conceptually, the shoal—as simultaneously water and land—presents a site of conceptual difficulty. The shoal represents a process, formation, and space that exists beyond binary thinking. Chapters in the book attend to where Black and Indigenous speech and grammar share the same tongue’
79 ‘Due to the way the pages of the maps were folded and pressed together, a palimpsestic trace of Black enslaved people working indigo gets reproduced again and again as faded duplication of the original image. I attend to the ways that this image works as a haunting and a reminder of the force of Black life.’
117 ‘Combining, merging, and creating new images of Black embodiment—particularly, errant Black bodily forms—also pushes at the limits of what is conventionally construed as the human body.’
140 ‘All bodies—Black, Indigenous, White—that produce the plantation as a living and porous social organism are subject to exposure to non-human elements. All bodies, though not equally, are hybrid assemblages and cumulative effects of multispecies entanglements.’
202 ‘Thinking with Sharpe’s poetic-scientific and Alexander’s ceremonial renderings of Black and Indigenous flesh and energy as living nutrients and components of the ocean, along with the shoal metaphor, enables a way to picture the process of solid ocean matter accumulating on the sea floor and rising up and breaking through the skin of the ocean like a pimple. Alexander’s and Sharpe’s incantations and poetics perform the capaciousness of Black diaspora studies.’
209 ‘I believe that our yet-to-come notions of connectedness and relationality are capacious enough to yield something more than coalition in the end. A new relationality can imagine new kinds of Black and Native futures. I believe that the stakes of this conversation are so high because of the capacity for Black abolition and Native decolonization to remake life in all its expansiveness on new terms. Just as Black and Indigenous life, struggle, and joy are forged off the shoreline in the space of the shoal, so must the new worlds we desire and make for one another.’
4 ‘I offer the space of the shoal as simultaneously land and sea to fracture this notion that Black diaspora studies is overdetermined by rootlessness and only metaphorized by water and to disrupt the idea that Indigenous studies is solely rooted and fixed in imaginaries of land as territory.’
11 ‘The way that shoals slow the movement and momentum of vessels acts as the organizing metaphor that structures the theoretical frame of the book.’
22 ‘The Black Shoals therefore stages an extended rumination on the theoretical, methodological, creative, and ethical potential of Black fungibility as a way of articulating a world-altering mode of existence.’
28 ‘Materially and conceptually, the shoal—as simultaneously water and land—presents a site of conceptual difficulty. The shoal represents a process, formation, and space that exists beyond binary thinking. Chapters in the book attend to where Black and Indigenous speech and grammar share the same tongue’
79 ‘Due to the way the pages of the maps were folded and pressed together, a palimpsestic trace of Black enslaved people working indigo gets reproduced again and again as faded duplication of the original image. I attend to the ways that this image works as a haunting and a reminder of the force of Black life.’
117 ‘Combining, merging, and creating new images of Black embodiment—particularly, errant Black bodily forms—also pushes at the limits of what is conventionally construed as the human body.’
140 ‘All bodies—Black, Indigenous, White—that produce the plantation as a living and porous social organism are subject to exposure to non-human elements. All bodies, though not equally, are hybrid assemblages and cumulative effects of multispecies entanglements.’
202 ‘Thinking with Sharpe’s poetic-scientific and Alexander’s ceremonial renderings of Black and Indigenous flesh and energy as living nutrients and components of the ocean, along with the shoal metaphor, enables a way to picture the process of solid ocean matter accumulating on the sea floor and rising up and breaking through the skin of the ocean like a pimple. Alexander’s and Sharpe’s incantations and poetics perform the capaciousness of Black diaspora studies.’
209 ‘I believe that our yet-to-come notions of connectedness and relationality are capacious enough to yield something more than coalition in the end. A new relationality can imagine new kinds of Black and Native futures. I believe that the stakes of this conversation are so high because of the capacity for Black abolition and Native decolonization to remake life in all its expansiveness on new terms. Just as Black and Indigenous life, struggle, and joy are forged off the shoreline in the space of the shoal, so must the new worlds we desire and make for one another.’
July 20, 2021
The preface was so beautiful it brought me to tears.
Especially enjoyed chapters 2 and 5 - cartographic enclosures, "home," and rewriting possibilities. Was especially struck by the descriptions of diasporic Black people in Canada, and want to read more in this area.
Chapters 3 and 4 were lengthy examinations of "Daughters of the Dust" as a way to rethink boundaries of self and eros, and as a challenge to notions of sovereignty. Powerful but also reminded me that I don't vibe with queerness as metaphor. (Thanks to reading this I figured out that my discomfort is because treating groups of people like a metaphor bothers me in general, so that's something.)
I would like to read more of the author's thoughts on how Marxism and queerness reproduce the limits of Whiteness, but that's out of scope for this book so I'll just have to look for other pieces :)
Limitations: the focus is strictly on Anglo-America with references to Africa limited to a starting point for diaspora. (I get the reasoning, but also couldn't help but think how much I'd have appreciated the inclusion of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Francis B. Nyamnjoh.)
Overall: beautifully written (in a highly academic sense), thought-provoking, and added half a dozen new books to my TBR.
Especially enjoyed chapters 2 and 5 - cartographic enclosures, "home," and rewriting possibilities. Was especially struck by the descriptions of diasporic Black people in Canada, and want to read more in this area.
Chapters 3 and 4 were lengthy examinations of "Daughters of the Dust" as a way to rethink boundaries of self and eros, and as a challenge to notions of sovereignty. Powerful but also reminded me that I don't vibe with queerness as metaphor. (Thanks to reading this I figured out that my discomfort is because treating groups of people like a metaphor bothers me in general, so that's something.)
I would like to read more of the author's thoughts on how Marxism and queerness reproduce the limits of Whiteness, but that's out of scope for this book so I'll just have to look for other pieces :)
Limitations: the focus is strictly on Anglo-America with references to Africa limited to a starting point for diaspora. (I get the reasoning, but also couldn't help but think how much I'd have appreciated the inclusion of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and Francis B. Nyamnjoh.)
Overall: beautifully written (in a highly academic sense), thought-provoking, and added half a dozen new books to my TBR.
April 24, 2025
The Black Shoals is truly a testament to the greatness of Tiffany Lethabo King’s writing ability, thought, and contribution to Settler Colonial Studies and Black Studies. Throughout the book, King is artful in their case study selection, application, and theory development stemming from each chapter.
I read portions of this book in a college philosophy course that I took in my undergraduate studies, and even the small portion of the book was transformative for how I engaged in settler colonial studies as a relatively new person to the subject/field. Reading the book all the way through now, almost 3 years later, makes my appreciation for this book even larger as I begin to appreciate the broad interconnection King makes to numerous scholars. What’s best about the book is the lack of necessity to have read the authors King lists to understand the argument King is making with them. The writing is accessible, explanatory, thoughtful, and each word has an impact on the reader.
The Black Shoals offers immense insight to social science fields, and for readers wishing to experience a thorough and thought provoking interconnection (shoal, if you will) between Black, Indigenous, Queer, and Feminist Studies, I wholeheartedly encourage you to read this book.
I read portions of this book in a college philosophy course that I took in my undergraduate studies, and even the small portion of the book was transformative for how I engaged in settler colonial studies as a relatively new person to the subject/field. Reading the book all the way through now, almost 3 years later, makes my appreciation for this book even larger as I begin to appreciate the broad interconnection King makes to numerous scholars. What’s best about the book is the lack of necessity to have read the authors King lists to understand the argument King is making with them. The writing is accessible, explanatory, thoughtful, and each word has an impact on the reader.
The Black Shoals offers immense insight to social science fields, and for readers wishing to experience a thorough and thought provoking interconnection (shoal, if you will) between Black, Indigenous, Queer, and Feminist Studies, I wholeheartedly encourage you to read this book.
December 2, 2024
really fantastic meditation on how to think of solidarities bw Blackness and Indigeneity in terms of disciplinary approaches to scholarship about identity + giving voice to resonances to Black and Native experiences with white supremacy. relies on Wynter, McKittrick, and Wilderson as scholarly counterparts. really compelling close analyses of several objects/activist encounters (defacing Christopher Columbus statue, re-reading a map of colonial-era South Carolina, analyzing wire sculpture) to explore what possibilities the metaphor of a shoal (an ocean-based shifting sense of land) opens up for thinking about the afterlives of slavery, ongoing dispossession of lands, settler colonialism, and anti-Black racism more intersectionally
May 27, 2022
ok i'm cheating because i still have 2 chapters left of this book. however, king's theorization of shoals, combining the experiences and theories of Black and Indigenous scholars was really powerful. she possesses an exacting eye and voices the continued oppression both of these groups experience today. she traces the dispossession and shape of discourse scholars, activists, and others attribute to discussing justice and reparations for each group. i found it incredibly informative, in depth, and moving.
this is one of the theories i used for my undergraduate thesis on diaspora and liminality.
this is one of the theories i used for my undergraduate thesis on diaspora and liminality.
December 29, 2021
Such an enjoyable and enriching read. Lethabo King draws on so many sources and disciplines and entangles them in a way that is illuminating. An ultimately hopeful outlook that points out and builds on the limits of existing discourse on settler colonialism and finds the potential for new coproduced Black and Indigenous relationality.
April 16, 2025
what King did here was really powerful and leaves so much room to improve both indigenous and Black studies. Outside of academia, black shoals can provide a new way of living (esp with King’s assertions of the erotic)
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February 28, 2020305.89607 K545 2019
June 9, 2021
I read this book for class and I absolutely loved it.
September 12, 2021
Wow. This was real far over my head but what I got was absolutely fascinating. I'll be thinking this over for a while.
June 1, 2022
Not going to lie, I think a lot of this went over my head. but there were a lot of "ooooooooohhhhhh" moments and I look forward to returning to this.
September 18, 2024
The black community has progressed beyond the need for critical theory. This book is essentially unreadable and does nothing the author promises they set out to do
September 25, 2025
Preface, intro, chapter 1, 3, 4
April 20, 2024
WOW this book literally changed my brain chemistry or whatever they say now like this book literally infiltrates the way I think exactly. Like idek how to explain, but anytime I think of any topic, no less a humanities topic, I have to think of a way to relate it to humanist cartography, man1+2, fugitivity, fungibility, or porosity. Like my brain-thinking-way is changed. Read ch.2. Also watch daughters of the dust best film ever my fav film tbh!!! Ok. Let me list every book that has changed my brain chemistry in the order of their brain-changing temporality:
1. Women, Race, and Class (wowwww changeeed)
2. Wretched of the Earth (like changed tbh)
3. Our Town (yeah, kinda changed)
4. Kafka on the Shore (oomf it really did change; it pushed me into my cringe ass enlightenment philosophy era omg I cant believe I was actually reading kant and hegel stooop thats so embarrassing anyway I feel like it was SO important for the next alteration)
5. Gawain and the Green Knight ~ The Poetics of Space (fuck that change was massive, MASSIVE, like I really entered my phenomenology era which very naturally slid me into that musical space of first blood orange, then arca, bjork, eartheater, which actually in turn very much inspired my literary movement of terrifying/abject biologies) (holy fuck this duo of works is like seminal to my brainspace)
6. A Third University is Possible (my first introduction into CT + Postcolonial Studies so like, so seminal, like)
7. The Animal that Therefore I Am (omg changed)
8. The Black Shoals (fucking CHANGED)
9. I want to say Beyond Miranda's Meanings but idk if thats right but like it did change if we're being honest! OH FUCK Maybe Donna Haraway ?? Naur not really. Um I think time makes a changer and I haven't had enough time to cement another. Perhaps Zakiyyah Iman Jackson? Lowk feel like Sianne Ngai is gna be but we'll see. Thought Barad's Posthumanist Performativity was gna be, and she lowk wasnt, still love her tho... Biopolitics of Feeling or Musser.
1. Women, Race, and Class (wowwww changeeed)
2. Wretched of the Earth (like changed tbh)
3. Our Town (yeah, kinda changed)
4. Kafka on the Shore (oomf it really did change; it pushed me into my cringe ass enlightenment philosophy era omg I cant believe I was actually reading kant and hegel stooop thats so embarrassing anyway I feel like it was SO important for the next alteration)
5. Gawain and the Green Knight ~ The Poetics of Space (fuck that change was massive, MASSIVE, like I really entered my phenomenology era which very naturally slid me into that musical space of first blood orange, then arca, bjork, eartheater, which actually in turn very much inspired my literary movement of terrifying/abject biologies) (holy fuck this duo of works is like seminal to my brainspace)
6. A Third University is Possible (my first introduction into CT + Postcolonial Studies so like, so seminal, like)
7. The Animal that Therefore I Am (omg changed)
8. The Black Shoals (fucking CHANGED)
9. I want to say Beyond Miranda's Meanings but idk if thats right but like it did change if we're being honest! OH FUCK Maybe Donna Haraway ?? Naur not really. Um I think time makes a changer and I haven't had enough time to cement another. Perhaps Zakiyyah Iman Jackson? Lowk feel like Sianne Ngai is gna be but we'll see. Thought Barad's Posthumanist Performativity was gna be, and she lowk wasnt, still love her tho... Biopolitics of Feeling or Musser.
September 21, 2019
I think I overhyped this for myself — it was good but not quite mindblowing the way I wanted it to be. part of that may also have to do with the fact that the core concept King introduces — “conquest” — showed up first in the article that chapter 1 was based on, so I was already on board with it and wanting more. still, it’s changed the way I think about the violences that create “North America” as such, and I’ll definitely be continuing to think with King’s work in the future.
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews