Description:

The Colloquium on Ethnicity and Diaspora welcomes Tiffany King, Associate Professor in African American Studies and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. King will discuss her newly published book, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press 2019). Nitasha Sharma, Associate Professor in African American Studies and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, will moderate a conversation with King following the lecture.

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. King's work recently won the 2020 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize, presented by the American Studies Association.

This talk is part of CED's two-year lecture series, "Survey: Contemplation. Control. Creativity" (2019-2021).