In a vast and multifaceted archive that ranges from the eighteenth century to 2015 and considers media including maps, film, novels, and sculpture, King demonstrates with each chapter how bridging the gap between Native and Black studies restores friction to the contemporary and historical landscape and unsettles conventional understandings of coalitional politics. Weheliye, and Sylvia Wynter) as well as Native studies’ refusal of sovereignty as a political, ethical, and material formation (Audra Simpson, Glen Coulthard, Jodi Byrd, and Andrea Smith), King joins the likes of Tiya Miles in seeing as insufficient any account of settler colonialism or Western humanism that does not consider how Black and Native epistemologies and histories intersect. Drawing in particular upon the Afro-pessimist tradition (for instance Frank Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Alexander G. To do so, she undertakes the urgent work of considering historical, ceremonial, imaginative, and theoretical ways that Native and Black studies intersect and overlap within the North American context. In this ambitious first book, Tiffany Lethabo King disrupts what she sees as settler-colonial studies’ tendency to privilege the settler/conquistador as the ethical subject of Western theory.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019, 304 pp.

The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies.

Conquest by Andrea Lee Smith