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Race, Ethnicities, and Inequalities Colloquium

“The When and Where of Our Talk:
The Shoals of Black and Native Feminisms”
Tiffany Lethabo King, Georgia State University

Tiffany Lethabo King is an assistant professor in the Institute for Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. King’s research interests include Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, Diaspora Studies, and gender and sexuality. King is the author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies published by Duke University Press this fall.

From the publisher: “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.”

Sponsored by the Office of the Provost and Academic Affairs, Center for the Study of Women in Society, and the UO School of Law.