Tiffany King's poetic and theoretically compelling text is both an invitation and disturbance, or a provocation to be unmoored, to be thrown into chaos and to place one's feet at the shoal of something other than traditional (normative) notions of sovereignty, nation, and citizenship. As a metaphor, a methodological meditation, and a Black feminist theoretical framework, King conceptualizes the “Black shoal” as “liminal, indeterminate, and hard to map” and elsewhere describes it as “an interstitial and emerging space of becoming” (3). Drawing on Kamau Brathwaite's Caribbean poetics of “tidalectics,” which evokes movement that cannot be captured within normative thought and European conceptualizations of time, subjectivity, and place, the shoal is a liminal space of simultaneity—both land and sea—yet unbounded and ever shifting. Within this inability to be made known in white settler geographies and liberal humanist discourses, or what King describes as an “unpredictability [that] exceeds full knowability/mappability” (3), resides...
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Book Review|
January 01 2022
The Erotic Chaos of Black and Indigenous Futures
The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies
, King, Tiffany Lethabo, Durham, NC
: Duke University Press
, 2019
. ix + 284 pp.GLQ (2022) 28 (1): 145–147.
Citation
Shanya Cordis; The Erotic Chaos of Black and Indigenous Futures. GLQ 1 January 2022; 28 (1): 145–147. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-9449174
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