Chad Infante, Sandra Harvey, Kelly Limes Taylor, and Tiffany King (bios)
In 2015, we began assembling a dialogue among Black identified scholars committed to research focusing on Black diasporan people about how Black Studies might approach Native and Indigenous Studies. Tiffany Lethabo King reached out to Shona Jackson, Melanie Newton, Faye Yarborough, Tiya Miles, Chad Infante, Shanya Cordis, Sandra Harvey, and Kelly Limes Taylor to think about how to have this conversation.1 A few of us were able to sustain conversations over email about convening at the American Studies Association (ASA) and Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) conferences. Over email and in digital space, we made suggestions about scholars to include, thought about questions that needed to be posed, and set goals for how to sustain a long-term conversation and build a community of scholars.
In 2019, Shanya Cordis, Sandra Harvey, Chad Infante, Shona Jackson, Tiffany King, and Kelly Limes-Taylor submitted a panel to ASA’s 2019 conference in Hawaii. After a series of emails, we named our roundtable “Other Intimacies: Black Studies Notes on Native/Indigenous Studies.” We thank Sandra Harvey for framing our thinking about the kinds of relationships and conversations we desired to have with Native and Indigenous studies as a kind of “other intimacy.” After careful drafting and redrafting (we are so grateful to Shona Jackson) we submitted the following proposal:
Recent attention to the ways that anti-Blackness, Indigenous genocide, and settler colonialism shape and inform one another have given rise to generative scholarship, conversations, and political work at the critical juncture of Black and Native/Indigenous Studies. This robust exchange has happened at the same time that settler colonial studies, as a discourse and field, has become the lingua franca in the academy for talking about social relations under the violent conditions of extermination, settlement, displacement, and migration. In reflecting on the unique ways that Black Studies has historically grappled with and continues to engage questions of Indigeneity, sovereignty, settlement, and nation alongside its sustained attention to diaspora, the roundtable participants address the ways in which settler colonial studies has opened up and closed off avenues between Indigenous and Black Studies, both of which have “grammars” that are often overshadowed by it. The participants on this panel discuss ‘what can be learned’ if the specific ways that Black Studies—a geographically, theoretically and politically diverse practice—has engaged and is engaging Native/Indigenous Studies is taken seriously. The panelists seek to engage Black Studies at both its points of entanglement with Native/Indigenous studies, and its points of closure.2
During the roundtable, the panel sought to reflect on the following questions:
- What particular genealogies, methodologies, traditions/practices, and scholars within Black Studies have been generative for engaging theoretical and conceptual concerns within Native/Indigenous Studies?
- What are some limitations to the aforementioned approaches?
- How has settler colonialism as a theoretical framework shaped discussion between Black Studies and Native/Indigenous Studies? What are the possibilities and limitations of this point of departure?
- What can theories of sovereignty that have emerged in Black Studies contribute to a mutual conversation/movement for decolonization and abolition?
- How have Black Studies’ conceptualizations and critiques of the “nation” and the “state” been in conversation with Native/Indigenous theorists’?
- What might be opened up in Black Studies when we focus attention on the notion and histories of indigeneity as much as we do or in conjunction with the theme of diaspora?
- How do Black Studies and Native Studies attend to each other with care? For example, how do we honor Black and Indigenous people particularly when focusing on violence and Black and Indigenous people’s bodies?
- How do we move forward/keep momentum?
We proposed, adjusted, and revised questions as a group. Some of the questions emerged from the intellectual labor and scholarly investments of specific participants. For instance, questions four and six, which inquire about Black theories of sovereignty and a refocus of attention from diaspora to indigeneity, were posed by Sandra Harvey. Harvey responds to these questions in elegant and prodding ways that require deep contemplation. Questions three, five, and seven were offered by Shanya Cordis, and ask the participants to think about what settler colonial studies as a discourse and field has offered and foreclosed, how Black Studies’ critiques of the “nation” and “state” interface with Indigenous theories of the nation, and finally how Black and Indigenous people might attend to one another with care. While not reproduced in the roundtable discussion or in this essay, Cordis’s contributions to this conversation were essential to the groundwork we did as a group. Kelly Limes-Taylor offers thoughtful and eloquent responses to Cordis’s questions in ways that ground readers in the everyday practice of decolonial struggle and of moving toward more promising horizons. Four of us (Harvey, Infante, Jackson, and King) were able to travel to the ancestral homelands and waters of the Kanaka Maoli in November 2019 for the ASA. The four of us hosted a vibrant exchange and discussion with those in attendance. We have tried to reproduce the conversation that took place during the roundtable between Harvey, Infante, Jackson, and King, which also continued in later weeks over email with Kelly Limes-Taylor. This essay will proceed with the edited written responses of the remarks offered at the ASA by Sandra Harvey, Chad Infante, and Tiffany Lethabo King. While Shona Jackson offered remarks during the roundtable, we were not able to include her written comments here due to time constraints and other demands. However, some of the answers below respond to Jackson’s offerings and insights at the roundtable.
The following are introductory remarks delivered by Tiffany Lethabo King on November 8, 2019 at the 2019 convening of the ASA in Honolulu, Hawaii, titled “Build As We Fight.”
Welcome to “Other Intimacies: Black Studies Notes on Native/Indigenous Studies.” This afternoon, I have the pleasure of keeping company and engaging three of the six scholars who continue to inform and transform my thinking after every encounter with them. I have been trying to bring us together to have this conversation for the last five years. While we are here on the ancestral lands and waters of the Kanaka Maoli this afternoon, my colleagues and I hope to attend to the ways that multiple Black Studies projects have engaged Indigeneity and Indigenous peoples across the African diaspora.
As scholars engaged in the practice of Black study, we want to consider “what we can learn” if Black Studies is used as a point of departure for engaging Native/Indigenous Studies. This conversation is not an effort aimed at critique, displacement, or the takeover of more recognized theoretical and disciplinary frames. However, the question “what can be learned if Black Studies is a point of departure?” introduces important theoretical, political, pedagogical, and ethical concerns. As panelists, we seek to engage Black Studies at both its points of entanglement with Native/Indigenous Studies and its points of closure. Black diasporan scholarship, with its attention to African descended people “on the move” as well as indigeneity in Africa, reorients how we think through the field of Native and Indigenous Studies. I have had the privilege of thinking with my colleagues Shona Jackson, Sandra Harvey, Shanya Cordis, Chad Infante, and Kelly Limes-Taylor about this provocation since the winter. In preparation for this much anticipated conversation, I have thought about the following things when I consider what it means to approach Native and Indigenous Studies from shifting and dynamic spaces of Black Studies:
What new questions and concerns rise to the surface?
What kinds of texts, objects, artifacts, and encounters do we need to consider?
Are new periodizations and temporalities in play?
What are the “unthought” geographies and ecologies that need to be surfaced?
Should we consider Black diasporan healing practices and modalities as a space to look for deep and or fleeting knowledge of Indigenous peoples and cosmologies?
Might we consider that some intimate, ceremonial, healing, and erotic work is off limits or considered sacred in Black Studies or by some scholars within Black Studies?
Instead of imagining that Black Studies is a space of lack and ignorance about Indigeneity, might we consider the silence a site of refusal or a critique of academic knowledge production?
In line with this posture of refusal, might there be a reticence on the part of Black scholars, due to a shared experience with Indigenous people of being objectified, to “study” Indigenous people?
Is there an unmappable practice of Black study and ethics that pursues being in relationship with Indigeneity rather than “knowing” it?
Q1: What particular genealogies, methodologies, traditions/practices, and scholars within Black Studies have been generative for engaging theoretical and conceptual concerns within Native/Indigenous Studies?
Chad B. Infante:
My first teacher of Native American Studies is my mother, Lynda Angela Duhaney. Like Sylvia Wynter, she is a teacher of Spanish. For this reason, she has always emphasized the Spanish possession of the island of Jamaica and their colonization of the Indigenous Taino people. To combat the convenient use of the “Black Legend” by the British and the claims that the Taino population on Jamaica was small—estimated at 15,000–20,000—because of its relative distance from the chain of Greater Antillean islands, she constantly reminded me that Jamaica, the Americas, and Africa were colonized and enslaved not only by the Spanish and British but by that minuscule and cold corner of the world called Europe.
It was only at the end of my graduate career that I realized her significant influence on my scholarship. In those restless dreams before and after submitting the dissertation, I could see the slim white bookcase that held her copies of Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, De Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, and Van Sertima’s They Came Before Columbus. Her influence and these works propelled me into a love of literature and scholarly inquiry. Her focus on the importance of performance, the spoken word, folklore, and global indigenous practices of storytelling led me to read and appreciate Native American literature. This, in turn, brought me to the work of Sylvia Wynter, Frank B. Wilderson, the debate between Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism, and to the important work of Sharon P. Holland and Tiya Miles.
Sandra Harvey:
Some of the most profound intellectual and political spaces in Black Studies are rooted in radical black feminist approaches to slavery studies. In particular I’m thinking about Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman’s work with the archives of slavery, whether they be the slave ledger, runaway slave advertisements, slave narratives and newspaper articles, or bodies and flesh. What stands out to me in these works is the ethical commitment that, I’d argue, represents Black feminist work at its best. For Hartman, the question has been, “What sort of ethics of care must I sustain with those enslaved Africans whom official archives are necessarily unable to represent?” For Morrison, it is to hold space for the interiority of enslaved black people, to combat a politics of respectability in representing ancestors, and in so doing, she asserts, her “single gravest responsibility,” despite a sort of magic that might guide events in their lives, “is not to lie” (93). In the name of this collective and personal responsibility to the dead and not-so-dead, Morrison’s “literary archeology,” Spillers’s “semiotics of the flesh,” and Hartman’s “critical fabulations” are methods that seek to tell “truth” as opposed to “fact,” or that which undergirds modern science and history’s positivism. I recognize a similar ethical, affective response to the archive (people’s prior lives/practices/cosmologies) in Native Studies.
Saidiya Hartman’s work is not generally considered to be in conversation with Indigenous Studies and studies of colonialism more broadly. Yet in Lose Your Mother, Hartman’s reflection on her research trip to Salaga and Gwolu, Ghana—places where people fleeing slave raiders and traders attempted to build and defend communities made from new kin—has many parallels with stories Native scholars and elders have told in what is currently called the United States. One of the greatest contributions of Lose Your Mother is the way it calls on Black Americans to consider a fuller picture of the transatlantic slave trade and its place within a larger colonial context shaping West Africa well into the present. Hartman has us consider the experiences of dispossession within Africa. It is a sort of dispossession that encompasses displacement from homelands, from kinship structures, and from one’s own self-determination. She writes of one now disappeared village of fugitives from raiders where
Newcomers were welcome. It didn’t matter that they weren’t kin or that they spoke a different language, because genealogy didn’t matter (most of them couldn’t go back more than three or four generations, anyway), building a community did. If the willingness to receive new arrivals and foreigners was what it took to make a world different from the one they had left, then so be it. So they put down their roots in foreign soil and adopted strangers as their kin and intermarried with other migrants and runaways, and shared their gods and totems, and blended their histories. “We” was the collectivity they built from the ground up, not one they had inherited, not one that others had imposed.(225)
Hartman relays the way these ancestors (if we are to call them so) responded to dispossession—not with a melancholic attempt at recuperation but as creative agents of dynamic culture and kin, even through the pain and threat of death.
Tiffany Lethabo King:
I value and hold dear so many of the texts and scholars that my colleagues have mentioned. Shona Jackson acknowledged [referring to Jackson’s oral remarks on November 8, 2019] the work of Frank Wilderson and what it made possible in her own work. I agree with Jackson that I don’t think I would have been able to do the work that I have done without Wilderson’s Red, White & Black (2010). While Wilderson and I are headed in different directions with our intellectual and political commitments (he is increasingly unconvinced that Black and Indigenous ontological positions and political commitments are compatible), in my own relentless efforts to make connections with Indigenous communities, Wilderson’s exploration of the ontological positions of the settler, slave, and savage is essential for my intellectual development. Wilderson creates a relational framework from which to think about how the ontological positionings of the settler, slave, and savage are produced in relation to violence and the figure of the White human. While Wilderson gives up on the project called the human and finds no contemporaries for Black people whose existence is overdetermined by slavery and death, Wynter, whose work I also find invaluable, views the praxis of being human an unfinished and revisable project that exists on the horizon. Like Wilderson, Wynter argues that overrepresentations of Man (versions 1 and 2) are formed and shaped through producing Blackness and Indigeneity as external to Man and making Black and Indigenous people “Human Others” (Wynter, “Unsettling” 283). Wynter’s schematic overview of the history of Western Humanism allowed me to think about Black and Indigenous existence simultaneously because she positions Indios/Natives and Negroes/Niggers at the bottom of the hierarchy of being even as Man becomes more expansive (Man1 evolves into Man2) over time. Finally, I would be remiss to fail to mention the Black and Indigenous women who made up the Toronto Chapter of INCITE. INCITE Toronto had such a deep impact on my spiritual and political development from 2006 to 2008. The Black and Indigenous women who were a part of this formation compelled me to confront the work of creating more ethical relations with myself, other Black folks, and Indigenous people as I navigated two settler nation-states that perpetuate genocide, conquest, colonialism and anti-blackness. In 2006 and 2007, professor M. Jacqui Alexander accompanied a few of us in some of this work, and I am so grateful for her legacy as a thinker and person led by spirit.
Q2: What are some limitations to the aforementioned Black Studies approaches?
CBI:
While I find Wynter’s and Van Sertima’s work useful for thinking the connection between Blackness and Indianness, both of their theories rest on flawed and recursive European logics. Van Sertima attempts to found a Black and Native American cultural and political connection by finding a moment of contact before the European colonial context. However, in this attempt, he supplants Native American conceptual worlds with African ones, and takes the European emphasis on phenotype as given. In addition, his work has emboldened unethical “hotep” and vernacular theories that argue that (dark-skinned) Native Americans are really Africans, and that this misrecognition is part and parcel of a colonial subterfuge against Africa. This claim leaves the American Native behind.
Wynter’s theory of the African in Jamaica as the “New Native of a New World “ has a similar outcome, and leaves Native Americans, once again, unthought. Wynter argues in her unpublished nine-hundred-page tome Black Metamorphosis that the African replaces the disappeared Tainos as the “New Natives of a New World.” The argument too smoothly supposes the colonial narrative of Native extermination and argues too strongly that Blackness is indigenous to the New World and not to Africa. In addition, works that emphasize the figure of the “Black-Indian” rely too heavily on the European hetero-patriarchal matrix of mixture and reproductive sex. Particularly, this narrative indicates that for Black people to have a connection to Native America, that connection must be biological, cultural, or genealogical, leaving politics as a source of connection far, far behind.
My most significant difficulty with Black engagements with Native America is with the desire to be indigenous to the New World. This is compounded by the ability of Indigenous people in the Americas to name the specific cultural lineage from which they hail, however fraught, and the relative difficulty of such a task for enslaved Africans brought to the Americas. The Black diaspora in the Americas need not claim indigenousness or nativeness to the Americas—or even to Africa for that matter—to make political and long-lasting connections with the Indigenous peoples of Africa or the Americas. Nor do they need to center the heterosexual and reproductively framed figure of the Black-Indian to make this connection. The only ground necessary for Black and Native connection is an unwavering and stern anti-colonial, anti-white, and anti-European politics.
SH:
One of the challenges we face in Black Studies in the US is that, institutionally and imaginatively, we are often too North American or even US-centric in our approach to studying black life. Returning to Lose Your Mother, this is exactly what confronts Saidiya Hartman. Her colleagues challenge her with this as she centers her own pain on the past. The South African scholar charges, “You think that the story of those in the Americas is the most important” (218). We must be careful in our approaches to Black Studies such that the transatlantic and “Black Atlantic” don’t become metanarratives that prevent us from engaging black life globally.
In Lose Your Mother, one woman at the market by the Elmina dungeon, the last place where many captive Africans were held before being shipped off to the so-called New World, offers us a reading of Hartman’s venture, but it could easily be directed at a certain sort of navel-gazing scholarship in the United States: “[Black] Americans come here to cry but they don’t leave their money behind” (Hartman 56). These comments call out the geopolitical position of middle-class Black Americans vis-à-vis global capital in a present where, as some have argued, memories themselves are commodities. The livelihood of Ghanaians through slavery tourism and the preservation of artifacts of the transatlantic slave trade depend on the erasure of their own dispossession.
At Troubling the Grounds, a conference at UC Irvine in 2019, SA Smythe and I asked attendees to consider the intersections of blackness and nativeness in a global context in order to think through colonial, imperial, and capitalist forces that have interacted with and shaped what blackness and nativeness have come to mean. What was clear is that we—those of us studying Black life in the US, in Europe, in the Pacific, in Africana Studies—are not used to talking to each other. We aren’t necessarily reading each other’s work and so when we want to engage each other we aren’t really prepared. If in the US and Canada we so often speak of Black and Indigenous experiences as mutually exclusive (barring some exceptions), scholars from the Pacific or from South Africa confront these issues as necessarily intertwined. Indigeneity is often but a specter in much of US Black Studies, and likewise we might find that diaspora haunts Native Studies on this hemisphere.
TLK:
I tend to find that much of the literature and critical theory in Black diasporan studies that addresses the Middle Passage and the enslavement of Black people lacks a robust grammar for talking about land. I think it is very difficult for descendants of the Middle Passage to have a discussion about land with Indigenous people in the Americas, Africa, and across the globe. Notions of land as a relation/relative, cosmology, sensation, language system, or aesthetic are not as discursively available within much of the theory, literature, and aesthetic practices of Black Studies. To be clear, I do not consider this particular privation a deficiency or failure on the part of Black diasporan people. Land often emerges as something that Black people who survived the Middle Passage are estranged from. They are brutalized by it, and long after, they have to come to terms with it and are forced to relate to it through colonial and nationalist notions of property. The violent rupture of the Middle Passage separated Black diasporan people who would “land in” the Americas from a relationship to other-than-human life forms like “land.”
I’m so grateful that Sandra Harvey mentioned Saidiya Hartman’s work in Lose Your Mother. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman details the trek from the Northern interior of Ghana through the savannah to the coast. What became clear for me while reading this portion of the book was that the slave route also became a place where African kinship and indigeneity were stripped from the captive. In the chapter “Lose Your Mother,” Hartman describes the way kinship was meticulously stripped from people. Hartman’s evocative retelling of the ways that captors used the land against the captive to produce a “landscape of forgetting” is heart-wrenching (156). Hartman reveals throughout the chapter a longing that is refused writing: “But as I traveled along the slave route, I soon found out about all the elaborate methods that had been employed to make slaves forget their country. In every slave society, slave owners attempted to eradicate the slave’s memory, that is, to erase all the evidence of an existence before slavery. This was true in Africa as in the Americas” (155). Later, Hartman pens, “in Ouidah, a town that had been a significant port on the Slave Coast, a university student told me that slaves were marched through a grove that induced forgetting, or that they encircled a tree of forgetfulness. Women had to circle the tree seven times, and men had to circle it nine times in order to forget their origins and accept their slave status” (156). What Hartman details for the reader is the deployment of land as a weapon against the captive. Continuing to detail the process of forgetting Hartman writes, “Every part of West Africa that trafficked in slaves possessed its own Lethe, rivers and streams whose water made the slaves forget their pasts, dense groves that trapped old memories in the web of leaves, rocks that obstructed entrance to the past, amulets that deafened a man to his mother tongue, and shrines that pared and pruned time so that only today was left” (156). Even sacred parts of the earth, like the leguminous undershrub manta uwa, “which means ‘forget mother’ in Hausa,” were given to the captives to ingest (156). Manta uwa “expunged all memories of a natal land, and it robbed the slave of spiritual protection” (156). Mother Earth itself was used against the captives to make them forget their emergence from it.
As processes of dispossession and alienation continue in the Americas, so do rituals and processes of resistance and recuperation. I am thankful for my colleague Xhercis Mendez’s question during the roundtable, which posed the possibility—or rather asserted the probability—that Afrodiasporic spiritual practices like Santeria elaborate embodied practices (dances and rituals for Yemeya), and ceremonial song and prayer produce vernaculars of terra and ocean and that are not always legible in academic Black Studies. Diasporan Black people must continue to recuperate and refashion relations, tongues, and embodied grammars for land.
Q3: How has settler colonialism, as a theoretical framework, shaped discussions between Black Studies and Native/Indigenous Studies? What are the possibilities and limitations of this point of departure?
CBI:
I am very, very grateful for the work of Tiffany King because my engagement with settler colonial studies is significantly influenced by her work. I had already read Wolfe’s staple work and that of others in graduate school when I encountered King’s stellar dissertation, In the Clearing. This work presented the white Australian genealogy of the field. More importantly, it challenged the primacy of settler colonial studies over Native Studies (particularly Native feminism) and the idea that settler colonial studies is a mediating force between Black and Native theories and peoples. I am indebted to King because her work taught me how to read settler colonial studies as a white formulation that downplays both Native American and African experiences of conquest and slavery by replacing them with the concept of settlement. She rerouted me away from settler colonial studies squarely into the wide world of Indigenous feminisms. This correction has been foundational to my current work.
SH:
Settler colonialism has provided a framework for centering both the structure and temporality of a certain sort of white colonial project. It confronts various resistance discourses—leftist, multiculturalist, and even homonationalist—to take seriously the present and ongoing colonial context in which we work. A critique of settler colonialism confronts the myth that the colonialism of what is currently called the United States has already been settled. This particular colonial project reorganizes our understanding of time and space such that the violence of the initial encounter becomes understood as prologue to the linear timeline of the nation-state. Moreover, we can understand the figure of the settler as another dimension of the figure of the slave owner and vice versa. Black Studies scholars have theorized the project of mastery as one that seeks to stabilize a white subject’s consumption and enjoyment of Black people—and in particular our bodies. Likewise, the figure of the settler allows us to understand the project of mastery in spatial terms, and thus how bodies and land become reorganized. Both Tiffany King and Shona Jackson relate how white settler-slave owners use black bodies within the plantation economy to clear and settle the homelands of peoples indigenous to Turtle Island and Abya Yala. Likewise, Native feminist scholar Audra Simpson explains that “An Indian woman’s body in settler regimes such as the US and Canada is loaded with meaning—signifying other political orders, land itself, the dangerous possibility of reproducing Indian life, and most dangerously, other political orders.… Indian women … transmit the clan, and with that: family, responsibility, and relatedness to territory” (15). There is a libidinal economy to the settler’s project through which the possession of Black and Native women secures sovereignty, or what we most often refer to in Black Studies as mastery.
Nevertheless, I think we have come up against major limitations with regard to the structural understanding emerging from settler colonial studies. That is, the triad structure comes up short in theorizing Black peoples’ experiences and positionalities in a nuanced manner—especially the way the afterlife of slavery, and anti-blackness in general, give shape to black subjectivity within the settler-slave owning project. It maps colonial racial categories onto various orientations such that, at least on Turtle Island, black must always signify “arrivant,” or in other renditions, “guest.” This category represents captive Africans as either existing in parallel to colonialism or as the bodies that enable colonialism, but never as colonized subjects themselves. The category also runs the risk of containing the descendants of enslaved Africans in an alienated relationship to place and homeland, perpetually tethered to a prior moment of arrival. What is the future that the category “arrivant” makes possible outside of the presumption of “departure”? I think new scholarship at this intersection would do well to explore what is enabled and foreclosed within this structural analysis for Black and Indigenous life. Can we tend to the ways we (in our multiple, varied, and changing forms) have developed or received relationships to land and kin, even in alienation?
TLK:
Settler colonial studies has given us a great deal to work with. The discourse, and now field, has grappled in good faith with the ongoing violence of settlement and the colonization of Native/Indigenous peoples and land. I think that the field does some things really, really well, particularly as it concerns forcing nationalist narratives, continental theory, and post-colonial theory to grapple with settler colonial relations. However, remembering my own struggles as a graduate student to square settler colonial relations with Black life, I maintain that white settler colonial studies is limited and to a large extent inhibits or frustrates attempts to bring black presence into view in the Americas. This failure is due in part to some of its conceptual and constituent elements. For example, the ontological premise or dialectic that grounds the antagonism of settler colonial relations is predicated on a settler/native dyad. This binary makes it difficult (damn near impossible) to incorporate enslaved and fungible chattel. Even the rubric of labor used to think about forced and coerced labor fails to fully register the position of Black enslaved people. Adding Black enslaved people into the native/settler dyad after the fact is a cosmetic change that does not address the limits of settler colonialism’s ontological universe, or account for the way that, in Hartman and Wilderson’s terms, Blackness remains a space of the “unthought.” Additionally, settler colonial studies cannot or will not address the ways in which the academy authorizes its displacement of Native scholars and of Native/Indigenous Studies. I tend to make a distinction between white settler colonial studies and Native feminist theorizations of settler colonialism, for example the Native feminist theory of Huanani-Kay Trask, which was introduced before white settler colonial studies gained so much prominence.
Q4: What may be opened up in Black Studies when we focus attention on the notion and histories of indigeneity as much as we do on or in conjunction with the theme of diaspora?
CBI:
While I am sometimes frustrated by the etiological debate between Black and Native Studies about which came first—New World conquest or African enslavement—I appreciate that this debate has produced a greater interest in the long history of antiblackness on the African continent itself and in Africa’s encounter with Europe and the Middle East.
As we excavate and uncover the history of racism, slavery, and conquest, we come to realize that these concepts are germane to European ideals and forms generally; we learn that they are not unique to the moments following African and New World “discovery” but to the full history of what is called Europe. When Black Studies focuses on indigeneity, we grasp that Black Studies and Native Studies have left African Studies to white anthropologists, and that all these fields in general, Black Studies included, are dominated, if not by white theorists and anthropologists, then by colonial frames, languages, conceptions, and intimacies. The process of reclaiming these fields—along with Early Modern Studies, Medieval Studies, and the Classics—from their white gatekeepers illuminates the long, long history of Greek, Roman, Medieval Western European, and Arabic-Muslim contact with and enslavement of dark-skinned sub-Saharan Africans (Hamel 75). This long and understudied history demonstrates that Black Africa has always been discussed from the outside.
In his important study Black Morocco: A History of Slavery, Race, and Islam, Chouki El Hamel dexterously explains that, in part, the civilization clash between Christian Europe and the Muslim Middle East facilitated the trade and transfer of concepts of dominance and power between these powers. Although conceptions of antiblackness existed in the European Middle Ages and earlier, the combination of local European and Arabic-Muslim antiblackness helps to create the European global form of African chattel slavery. (It is important to add that the exportation of these local European and Arabic-Muslim conceptions of Blackness to the Native inhabited territories of the Americas creates both Blackness and Indianness as truly global forms.) In the moment of the Moorish occupation of Iberia, Europe takes up particular conceptions of Black slavery developed by Muslim legal scholars in the first and second caliphates (El Hamel 76–77: Spillers 69–70). These Muslim scholars incorporate earlier Bedouin practices of holding dark-skinned Africans as slaves and install these practices into Muslim law despite the absence of any justification of slavery in the text of the Quran itself (El Hamel 18–19). If we focus on moments of contact and conflict between these two theological formulas of conquest around the Mediterranean Sea and on their pre-history, we see that along with certain aspects of Black slavery, the Muslim world transfers the concept of sovereignty and the numeral zero—all of which, to me, are related to indigenous Africanness and Blackness as the nothingness, the zero point, against which theology structures itself.
In Gomes Eanes De Zurara’s 1441 text The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, the historian augments Portuguese Christian conceptions along with Arabic ethnic distinctions from an Arabic nobleman named Adahu who is captured as a slave (48). In order to save and ransom himself, the nobleman offers ten Black Moors in exchange for his own person and two other boys. He informs the Portuguese lords that Black Africans, though Muslim, are converts and “were not of the lineage of the Moors (Mohammedans proper)” (55). They were not People of the Book; they “were Gentiles,” ergo slavable, “the better to bring into the path of salvation” (55). In addition to Adahu’s distinctions, De Zurara presents and combines the Curse of Cain and the Hamitic myth (55). He also cites the work of Jewish historians and other texts such as “the Archbishop Don Roderic of Toledo, and Josephus in his book of Antiquities of the Jews and Walter with other authors” (55). In the progression of the text, De Zurara’s ethnic, racial and theological terms of distinction become more precise, indicating that he learns the European term “Moor” at best describes the Muslim world as an empire but does not account for the conquered peoples of differing ethnic, religious, and racial origins that fall under the rule of Islam. He then begins to use the term “Black Moor” and “blackamoor” (105) to distinguish between captured Arab and Black Muslim slaves.
When we focus on the history of the circum-Mediterranean we get a broader and earlier context for the relationship between Blackness, sovereignty, and the number zero. This is not to suggest that Europeans simply learn Black slavery from the Arab-Muslim world—especially considering earlier Classical and Roman conceptions of Ethiopian Blackness and dark-skinned Africans as aesthetically unpleasing (Snowden 7–8) and Jewish conceptions of the Curse of Cain and the Hamitic Myth (El Hamel 60)—but to suggest that the Mediterranean world traded in conceptions about sub-Saharan Africa and dark-skinned Africans as slavable long before the advent of the “Age of Discovery.” Rather than suggest that either Europeans or Arab-Muslims created Black slavery in isolation, I contend that their collective descriptions and ideas about sub-Saharan dark-skinned Africanness are key to Blackness as we come to know it today, as an ontological and external description grafted onto the history of Africans and their descendants.
Most importantly, we learn that it is circulation of ideas about Africa between the European and Arabic-Muslim worlds, and then from Europe to the Americas, that transforms Blackness and Black slavery from its localized Mediterranean form into a global one—which is to say, into its ontological form. Put another way, the encounter between indigenous Africans and indigenous Americans allows for the creation of a global form of antiblackness and Native American genocide. Through their encounter and comparison, they are fashioned as global racial types, both with and against each other.
SH:
Native and Indigenous Studies has prompted me to think more thoroughly about the relationship of black people(s) to land and about our own meditative traditions. Here I want to thank Tiffany King for the beautiful recollection of this relationship as it emerges in Hartman’s Lose Your Mother. I want to come back to the “accessibility” of land, of thinking land. I think it is right to say that the question of the relation of black life to land in settler colonialism discourse is not a deficiency within Black Studies. Nevertheless, I do gather that a sustained reorientation towards our relations with land offers us a better understanding of our presence beyond positivist or transparent geography, as McKittrick calls it, and territory as it relates to the state. Land comes up in the stories we tell ourselves. Here I’m thinking about that Clearing where Baby Suggs gathered black folks for revival in Beloved. Morrison describes it as “a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of a path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place” (87). The use of the word “cleared” as a past-tense verb brings attention to the violence involved in the act of clearing the land. Yet, Suggs’s move from church buildings to the land becomes an invitation to return black people to their own bodies. Suggs tells the people gathered amongst the trees, “Here . . . in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard” (88). I imagine here in the Clearing, amongst the violence of its making, black people are able to relate to land in excess of what settler structures might allow, and in so doing, for at least a moment, find respite from the logic of fungibility.
Kelly Limes-Taylor enters the post-ASA roundtable discussion via email to extend the conversation. Chad also re-enters the conversation to conclude our engagement.
Q5: What can theories of sovereignty that have emerged in Black Studies contribute to a mutual conversation/movement for decolonization and abolition?
Kelly Limes-Taylor:
First, I want to say I am pleased to have my thoughts on these questions combined with the thoughts of such an amazing group of people. Some time ago, my work as an educational theorist and philosopher moved me from thinking about our world in terms of concrete, definable disciplines, identities, and experiences and into thinking about our world primarily in terms of the stories we tell ourselves for a time—and the stories that we don’t know (yet) and/or that were hidden/taken from us. When thinking about sovereignty, I tend to hover around the work of Sylvia Wynter because of her emphasis on the importance of language in shaping experience. As I note in a recent Curriculum Inquiry article, Wynter (1976, 2000) discusses the Word, a concept that includes not only the denotations of language but the “abstract thought and story systems” with which humans subordinates themselves; humanity, I argue, needs
to again create a system of abstraction that represents the human being in a whole new way, something completely different from colonial constructions of humanity, and, thus, non-humanity, of which Blackness is the marker in this Western colonial era (as cited in Gagne, 2007, p. 259). In short, the representation would bear no relation to the Western definition of human and humanity that requires Indigenous genocide and Black enslavement/fungibility, two of the three elements Smith (2010) asserts are the foundations of US settler colonialism. (16–17)
Per my reading of Wynter, we decide, in a shared conversation, what our world is or is not, what it is going to be. We define it, as such defining is the very work of being human. I believe that Wynter’s discussion of our ability to decide and define, and then act on those decisions and definitions—indeed, our ability to be truly human—represents the meaning of sovereignty.
Shared conversations about decolonization and abolition likely require that we first establish which stories about ourselves, each other, and the world around us are true for us, and true for the world we want to see. Next, we identify the false stories about ourselves and each other that have been forced upon us and under which we still labor. Finally, we start doing our work and living our lives as if the true stories we’ve identified for ourselves are, indeed, true—defending/protecting ourselves against those who want to force false stories upon us, but otherwise not paying them much mind. It feels almost laughable to discuss everything-changing concepts like sovereignty, decolonization, and abolition in terms of a simple, three-part plan, but this is the only thing that has made sense to me thus far. And I’m clear about the difference between simple and easy here; while this is a simple plan, it’s not an easy one.
TLK:
I have not spent time tracking and thinking with the key term sovereignty in Black Studies, per se. However, I think that bodily autonomy and the right to self-defense are concepts that are taken seriously within Black social and political thought, spanning the ideologies of Black liberalism and the Black radical tradition. Black people take their lives and those of their loved ones seriously. Black life is sacred and this is the bedrock of Black liberation movements. Critical Black Studies, emerging from abolitionist traditions, troubles the idea of Black sovereignty, or autonomy, and even, in some cases, of a Black body to defend. I see this in the work of Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson. They question the existence of sovereignty for a Blackness without personhood. In her recent book Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Anti-Black World, Zakiyyah Jackson argues that the notion of sovereignty as absolute freedom is a dangerous idea that stands in opposition to relationality (146). I think that this kind of critique of the liberal human, sovereignty, and the attendant notion of an autonomous and unfettered self is productive and can be a space of resonance with some Indigenous critical theory. For instance, Indigenous feminist notions of native sovereignty in Maile Arvin, Angie Morrill, and Eve Tuck’s article “Decolonizing Feminism,” premised on relationality across species, align with the kinds of critical relationality that Zakiyyah Jackson gestures toward in her work.
SH:
What I find so generative in Black Studies—at least various genealogies within what we’ll call Black Studies—is its push to bring freedom into conversation with those calling for sovereignty. This presents a true dilemma for the idea of sovereignty. That is, what has emerged as “sovereignty” in Western traditions is shored up specifically through its juxtaposition with blackness, with Nativeness, and with queerness. Black Studies scholars have thought through the idea of sovereignty or mastery at the level of the subject and against the figure of the “slave,” and thus asked us to think through the meaning of self-determination or autonomy if we accept that the boundaries of the self are constantly in question. I’d say this is also true for nations or peoples.
Tiffany’s descriptions of black porosity and of the Sycorax wire sculpture in The Black Shoals are perfect examples of this idea of autonomy. In the vulnerability, the gaps between boundaries, intimacy is possible and new ways of being emerge. Tiffany describes the wire sculpture as a co-presence: “The intertwined bends, curls, and unfurlings of the wire memorialize the Black and Native female in the Americas . . . Sycorax is a relational entity . . . In the wire sculpture, Lurch renders Indigeneity and Blackness indistinguishable as they are both represented by the color black or the dark feminine. The copper wire and black wires meld into one another like skin” (186). Tiffany, through Jackson and Arvin, Morrill, and Tuck, describes the sculpture as an instance of critical relationality, where the “self” of self-determination is both questioned (in its ability/desire to achieve full autonomy) and affirmed (in its movement vulnerable to the other that is in the self and without which the self could not be).
These conversations have me thinking through various acts or actions via sovereignty rather than via bodies. Teaching about the master slave dialectic in our graduate courses, David Marriott would remind us, “There are plenty of slavish masters and masterful slaves.” In part, I take this as a push to think through orientations and/or acts as sovereign. In one sense, orientation or acting is the sort of sovereignty that does not depend on recognition from or against an Other. But it is also about the law-making actions that produce ruptures in the colonial and slave owning symbolic order. I understand Fanon’s reflections on violence in this vein, but I also consider that the way “speaking” (as Kelly has pointed out) and ceremonies, as Tiffany puts it in The Black Shoals, “carry potential for transformation” (199). Rather than foundational, institutional, or grounded sovereignty (nothing that Jared Sexton critiques a certain understanding of sovereignty with land as its basis), this notion of sovereignty is fleeting, emergent, and relational. It is found in Standing Rock, Alcatraz, the Dakota road blocks, and in the defiance of the uprising for Black lives.
Q6: How have Black Studies’ conceptualizations and critiques of the “nation” and the “state” been in conversation with Native/Indigenous theorists?
KLT:
I’m particularly drawn to the concept of nationhood here, because it reminds me of when I first connected Daniel Heath Justice and Saidiya Hartman’s discussions of kinship. I was researching for my dissertation when I first came across Justice’s work. He relates kinship to nationhood in a way that was paradigm-shifting for me, as I’d only been acquainted with colonial notions of kin and nation. Justice defines kinship as the “recognition of some sort of relationship between and among peoples,” and asserts that, in the Indigenous context, nationhood is an understanding of a common social interdependence with the community, the tribal web of kinship rights, and responsibilities that link the People, the land, and the cosmos together in an ongoing and dynamic system of mutually affecting relationships (151).
From this position, I learned that interdependence, relationship, responsibility, and mutuality define nation, not the dictates of people who couldn’t care less about whether you, your human kin, or the environment around you thrives or dies. Justice further extends the concept of kinship to connection with the living world around us, “from the plants and animals to the sun, moon, thunder, and other elemental forces” (151), and asserts that kinship is something we do (148). I want to also include Shawn Wilson here, who notes that “we are the relationships that we hold and are part of” (80). Both these thinkers helped me redefine what I understood as the concept of nation—namely that nation encompasses our understanding of the relationships we have with the living beings and environment around us.
When I was brought to Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, I could see the overlap between Black and Indigenous conceptualizations of kinship and, thus, nationhood. More specifically, I was able to see more clearly the ways that Black folks in these lands—most of us descended from Indigenous peoples whose relationships with their environments were violently, devastatingly, and almost-permanently stripped from them—consistently worked to protect and maintain notions of kinship, beginning with their first abrupt removal (and with each subsequent removal). Indigenous peoples in these lands were fighting to maintain their kinship networks at the same time my people were. I believe we both have been struggling to get our nationhoods back to us—in our own ways, as best as we have been able to do over these centuries. This consideration of Black Diasporic restorative practice as response to the intentional and historical separation from indigenous roots can foster solidarity between Diasporic Black and Indigenous decolonization initiatives and movements, as the two histories account for two sides of the proverbial Western colonialist coin.
Black American life in the US is, among other things, very much the result of Indigenous peoples’ being taken from their land; Indigenous American life in the US is, among other things, very much the result of Indigenous peoples’ land being taken from them. We’ve had our nationhoods taken from us and were then told that those doing the taking represented the real, true nation. But that simply isn’t true. Real nation is responsibility and connection, not dominance and exclusion.
CBI:
I think that the best work of Black and Native artists, academics, and activists offers a criticism of the nation-state even when the state is not named as the explicit target of critique. Even those works and actors that might seem to placate the state are attempting to balance the short- and long-term political needs of their communities. This is a difficult balance to strike, and in the face of violence, Black and Native people have often chosen political strategies based on pragmatism and life, and rightly so. The immediate political needs of a community in response to hunger and shelter are weighed and balanced over and against the long-term political goals that might be required for structural transformation. Many Black and Native actors try to balance these needs and goals in a world where they recognize that they have to engage the state to access certain resources in order to live, all the while offering strident critique and imagining new forms of community care. Despite the need for this engagement, both Black and Native theorists and writers continue to question the legitimacy of the nation-state.
TLK:
I will speak to the resonances between fields in my response. Like Kelly Limes-Taylor, I am struck by Daniel Heath Justice’s notion of peoplehood, which distinguishes tribal-based understandings of nation from colonial and state-based understandings of the nation. This revision rebukes the Cherokee nation model that requires Black enslavement and antiblackness as a condition of recognition. For Justice, Cherokee peoplehood is a “relational system that keeps the people in balance with one another, with other people and realities, and with the world” (Our 24). This invocation of peoplehood resonates with a notion of Blackhood articulated by Toni Cade Bambara in “On the Issue of Roles” in 1970. Bambara similarly tries to construct Blackness outside of the colonial constraints and violent strictures of gender. Bambara argues that “perhaps we need to let go of all notions of manhood and femininity and concentrate on Blackhood” (Black Woman 126). She calls for fashioning an identity and a self outside of the categories of manhood and womanhood, “perhaps an androgynous self via commitment to the struggle” (126). This revisioning and refashioning of categories forms the connective tissue that brings Black and Indigenous thought and worldmaking together beyond nation, gender, and the human.
Q7: How do Black Studies and Native Studies attend to each other with care? For example, how do we honor Black and Indigenous people particularly when focusing on violence and Black and Indigenous people’s bodies?
KLT:
Unfortunately, those of us involved with the academy often find our writing and thinking bound by academia’s farcical mores of objectivity and emotional distance—even when we’re dealing with topics that negatively affect our everyday lives. This is doubly true when our research is focused on the experiences of marginalized groups; triply true when we researchers also identify as members of those groups. I think that we—marginalized researchers researching marginalized peoples/experiences—often feel obligated to play into this act of distancing so that we can sound reasonable and sober enough to have our work accepted by a White supremacist institution that isn’t really checking for us in the first place, since the academy’s first priority—as with all institutions in this White supremacist conceptualization of a nation—is to uphold the supremacy.
I begin my answer to this question in this way because, though I’m offered the idea of violence and bodies to use as example here, I believe that the question itself is indicative of the foundational White supremacist violence that Black and Native studies often highlight, particularly in the US context. How do we attend to each other with care? We ask ourselves this question as if truly caring for each other (and, really, for ourselves) within a super violent national context is mysterious or complex, as if we haven’t been doing it all along.
So, I respond with my own questions: how are we caring for our friends, our comrades (for those that choose that term), right now, in real time? How do we care for our family every day? How do we care for cousins we have not seen in a long time or for those who have long joined us in struggle, often just as nameless or unseen as we? The answers to these questions, I believe, also address how those of us in Black and Native studies can attend to each other with care. I also want to note that, in order to take this out of the realm of abstraction, I read the initial prompt as How do Black and Native people attend to each other with care? within the US context, as hypothesizing about doing something in academia isn’t worth much if we’re not talking about how we just do it in our everyday lives.
I believe that we must be clear about the context in which we are trying to survive as people. Those of us in the US exist in a nation- and society-making context that is violence: forcing millions of people into ways of life other than those of their choosing for hundreds of years may be a lot of things, but it will always be violent. That means that the institutions emerging from this context will always be violent as well, each in its particular way; the violence, after all, must be multi-faceted and all-encompassing in order to continue. Supremacist academic violence has historically shown up in the forms of objectivity and distance, subsequently allowing for other violences (and justifications for supremacist violence outside the academy) to occur. I’m thinking of Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s groundbreaking discussion in Decolonizing Methodologies in particular here.
Indigenous and Black folks who find ourselves in the academy may also feel like we have to play into that historically violent objectivity and distance. So, for the most part, we don’t get to be angry in the classroom (for fear of negative student evaluations) or rail as we write up our research (because the infamous reviewer #2 won’t go for that). The pride or passion we feel has to be subdued, contained. We quietly hold the extent of our love for our people behind office doors, or carefully launch it in direct messages to safe colleagues, or keep it safely tucked away during meetings with fellow faculty members who just don’t (or won’t) get it.
In my opinion, we need to stop that shit. The Western academy isn’t anything holy; in fact, it’s the opposite of that. It is the knowledge-creating and -perpetuating institution established by people who, if alive today, wouldn’t even agree we are human like them. Objectivity and distance don’t serve us and don’t serve anyone. Neither do separations between the disciplines. The violences that Indigenous and Black folks face in the US aren’t separate from each other, but are part of the White supremacist social and economic campaign that began on these lands hundreds of years ago–a campaign that has never stopped. Showing care and honor, then, means that we never stop acknowledging the violence, and that we are loud and unapologetic about caring for ourselves and each other.
We care for each other just like we normally show care for those we love, both near and far: openly, without shame or pretense of objectivity. We care for each other just like we normally show care for those we don’t know who are experiencing the same things we are: by learning more about their experiences and amplifying them, by reaching out and asking how we can be accomplices. We care for each other in ways that defy the barbarity of White supremacy: by acknowledging, holding, and healing our own pain while making space for the pain of others—including the pain we experience from hurting each other, due primarily to the mind-boggling violence perpetuated upon both of us on these lands.
We mourn for ourselves and each other. We get loud for and about ourselves and each other. We fight for ourselves and each other. Without apology, without wavering.
CBI:
It is important that we read each other’s work and histories and that we show up for each other. Because the relationship between these two disciplines and communities is mediated by a third party, Black and Native people should speak to each other in order to have a more honest account of the relation between the two communities. It also is essential that we read, cite, and defend the work of Black and Native women who are often on the frontlines of activist, academic, and artistic work. From #Sayhername to #MMIW, Black and Native women provide the most important examples of how we can honor people and communities facing violence. Accordingly, I think that it is vital that we return to their work and example again and again and again. More than this, I think we should make a habit of pairing and reading Black and Native women’s work together.
TLK:
To some extent I attempted to speak to this issue of care in my 2019 introductory remarks for the ASA panel, which also open this essay’s roundtable discussion. I think that building relationships with each other both outside and inside the academy is essential. Building spaces of connection, healing, and dialogue that are not oriented toward producing a product/commodity can change the terms of our engagements with each other as Black and Indigenous people in the academy. We cease to be objects of study for one another. As I reflect on the rather late entry of the fields of Black Studies and Indigenous Studies in the academy in the late 1960s, I think that this belatedness and marginalization in the university could be a kind of gift. For example, being in a marginalized field means that we have not had the time nor have we developed a desire for the pay-off of developing epistemologies and approaches that objectify and pornotrope one another. While I’m not saying that this does not happen and cannot happen, our fields have not emerged from the violent epistemological formations of colonial projects. We have an advantage in this sense. Many of us come from communities that refuse to make some of our intimate, ceremonial, healing, and erotic work material for knowledge production. We come from communities with good boundaries who practice refusal (Simpson). Our ethics and our political commitments of care (Sharpe) can shape our fields in critically important ways.
SH:
I’m grateful already for the attention to care that I’ve received by so many Black and Native scholars and the care with which my colleagues and comrades have carried out this roundtable. Like Kelly, I have serious doubts about the sorts of care possible within our institutions. We are precarious workers (some more than others). Our departments are always the first to be cut. Our students often receive the least amount of institutional support and respect. I have been rereading Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s Undercommons with my students, and we are constantly taken by the charge that “the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one” (26). I say this as multiple institutions are being pushed to account for their accumulation of wealth through slave trafficking. Most universities have not begun to reckon with the truth that their existence is made possible through land grants, which in turn were made possible only by dispossessing Indigenous peoples of their homelands. In the past, Indigenous peoples resisted colonial civilizing missions by burning down boarding schools that sought to separate children from families and peoples from their languages and cultures. We (Black, Indigenous, and other “Third World” students) have also made demands on the university for autonomy in creating departments and research programs that center our work and study. Black and Native scholarship share a tradition that recognizes the many ways we produce knowledge, which can include university settings, but also oral histories, music, dance, practices of care, ceremony, uprisings, and art. These are the stakes of our continued and collective care. That we tend to each other, Black, Indigenous, and Black and Indigenous peoples, that we tend to each other’s relations and each other’s homelands as if our very existence depends on it, because as we know, it has and it does. This includes learning from each other, mourning and celebrating with each other, convening and, when necessary, holding each other accountable and making amends.
Q8: How do we move forward/keep momentum?
CBI:
We must constantly remind ourselves that precisely because the relationship between these two communities is mediated by whiteness and colonial concepts, moments of Black and Native American contact occur in a minor register. They reflect small moments that flit in the corner of the eye, only to disappear when you try to focus on them. These small, mutable, and fragile moments demand not that we walk on eggshells, but that we craft carefully, deliberately, and ethically. Black and Native people must wholeheartedly engage each other and this ethic in their art, music, and literature. And they must do this all while holding at bay those best intentioned “white allies”—if there are indeed such persons—until after Black and Native people have had enough time to commune with each other. Then and only then, if at all, might “white allies” be invited to participate in the conversation.
KLT:
Given the current social and political climate in the US, I think that the primary way we can move forward is to continue (or to begin, for some of us) to imagine what our society looks like beyond the mayhem we are seeing around us without getting distracted or dismayed by it. If we believe that we are watching the death throes of White supremacy (whether the beginning or the end throes—I, of course, have no idea about that), I think we can better orient ourselves to the work that is ahead of us, especially when it comes to imagining and thus creating a future in which those of us who have previously been so disastrously oppressed can love and center ourselves while making space safe for others to do the same. The current times may feel particularly heavy for Native and Black folks, especially when the backlash to taking the slightest step forward seems to resound so loudly. We can feel heartened when we remember that under White supremacy, we have never not experienced genocidal extraction, and that our continued existence evinces that we are stronger than it and can and will survive beyond it. As we come to understand that we have a shared struggle, as we continue to link and recognize each other’s struggles, and as we gain more and more confidence in the ways of knowing and being that have carried us through to this time, I believe that we can carry ourselves into a beautiful future. It is hard and can feel so defeating, but I believe we will win.
TLK:
Since 2016, the increased visibility of Black and Indigenous liberation movements in the US has created an opportunity to frame social justice issues necessarily as matters of Black abolition and Indigenous decolonization. Additionally, as we navigate our COVID pandemic reality, we have had to innovate and create new modes of connection and communication. As our communities continue to contract the virus and die at alarming and disproportionate rates, I have seen Black and Indigenous people use digital platforms to organize and promote necessary conversations taking place between Black and Indigenous people. I’m both devastated by the losses that we have experienced and also moved and energized by the desire and efforts to talk to one another. We need to continue talking to one another on terms and grounds that we create together.
Chad B. Infante is a post-doctoral fellow and assistant professor of African American and Native American literature in the English department at the University of Maryland, College Park. Chad earned his doctorate in English from Northwestern University in 2018. Originally from Jamaica, his research focuses on black and indigenous US and Caribbean literatures, gender, sexuality, critical theory, and political philosophy.
Sandra Harvey is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Kelly Limes Taylor does many things, including think, mother, teach, and write. She lives in the upper left corner of Georgia, U.S., with her family.
Tiffany King is an Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Georgia State University. She is the author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, Duke University Press, 2019.
Footnotes
1. Between 2015 and 2019, we considered many other people including Kendra Fields, Robert Keith Collins, Alaina Roberts, Andrew Jolivette, Arica Coleman, and Arika Easley Houser, whose contributions we are deeply indebted to but we lacked time and organization to initiate the conversations. We hope to initiate conversations with these scholars and others in the near future.
2. This text is copied from the proposal submitted to American Studies Association in January 2019 and appears in the 2019 American Studies Association conference program.
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