In her talk “Red and Black Alchemies of Flesh: Conjuring A Decolonial and Abolitionist Now,” on the evening of Thursday, October 21, Dr. Tiffany King responded to Black, Indigenous, and Marxian critiques of her work in The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies.
King expanded her thinking on those relationships, traditions, and engagements between Black and Indigenous thought and studies on genocide and conquest, using her conceptualizations of fungibility and porosity in contrast to the dominant labor framework, and as they pertain to the larger environment. Drawing from The Shoals’ analysis of Julie Dash’s film “Daughters of the Dust,” as well as other historical and contemporary sources, they considered the intimate, the erotic, the human, and the body in Black and Indigenous theory to reconstruct the potential for abolition and decolonization.
Assistant Professor Brittany Meché of the Center for Environmental Studies, who similarly anchors her academic background in Black geographies, introduced King and moderated a question and answer section. In September, Professor Meché published a review of The Black Shoals in “Society and Space,” which can be found here.
King specializes in African Diaspora Studies, Black Ecologies, Native Studies, and decolonial and abolitionist theory. Her first book, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, won the Lora Romero First Book Prize of the American Studies Association. They are also the co-editor of Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Black Racism. King is currently an Associate Professor of Women, Gender and Sexuality at the University of Virginia. Read more here.
BY SABRINE BRISMEUR ‘22.5
This lecture was sponsored by the Class of 1960 Scholars Program in Environmental Studies. A small group of student scholars joins the distinguished lecturer for an hour-long seminar discussion and, in non-COVID times, an intimate dinner before the public lecture.