The Erotic Chaos of Black and Indigenous Futures

Abstract

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 the meeting ground for blackness and indigeneity, and the dialogic space between Black studies and Native studies. King thoroughly tracks how Black diasporic and hemispheric work on “middle passages, geographies, rootless relation to nationstates, and encounters with Indigenous peoples amid the violence of New World modernity” (12) index how Black people subjected to the legacies of imperialism, conquest, and nationstate formation “have always been trying to communicate with Indigenous peoples” (13). King explores these moments of the shoal of blackness and indigeneity, as an interruption, or slowing, of dominant narratives within the field of settler colonial studies, as well as certain threads within Native studies, that bind blackness