TIFFANY LETHABO KING on The Black Shoals [with brontë velez], Part Two /316
High contrast black and white photograph by Javier Esteban of a rippling silhouette mirrored by the shallow, offshore waters.
This week For The Wild Podcast presents Part Two of a two-part conversation between guest host brontë velez and Dr. Tiffany Lethabo King. Circumferencing Dr. Tiffany Lethabo King’s book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies, brontë and Tiffany explore sacred laughter, Black and Indigenous feminism, sexuality, liberation, ceremony, and protocol. This week we are cradled to explore where Black and Indigenous relations can meet beyond the wound. Part Two spans further inquiry into shoals, the physical desire to belong to Earth, agency, eros, spiritual correction, the pleasure and potential of failure, and that which cannot be translated, but instead has to be experienced or co-witnessed to be understood. Research for this conversation was curated by jazmín calderón torres.
Recorded in January of 2021, this interview is a companion piece to a project called Can I Get A Witness, a collaborative transmedia project between For The Wild and Lead to Life. Can I Get A Witness “traces two queer black latinx femmes, brontë velez and Stephanie Hewett, dancing before and being danced by the ecology, memory, and stories of the Tongass National Forests and Glacier Bay in southeast Alaska–unceded Haida, Tsimshian, Tlingit territories, scored by field recordings and music, interviews with Tiffany King, Wanda Kashudoha, and Kasyyahgei, with a Groundtruthing Oracle by jazmín calderón torres.
“The land is making space for you. It remembers you. It is calling you and pulling you towards it.”
Tiffany Lethabo King (her/they) is a descendant of African people enslaved in the US South. She grew up in Lenapehoking and currently works/resides on Monacan Lands. King is an associate professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Virginia. She is also a co-director of the Black and Indigenous Feminist Futures Institute (BIFFI) funded by the Mellon Foundation. Tiffany is the author of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Duke University Press, 2019). As a scholar and teacher, she is committed to thinking about how centuries long relationships between Black and Indigenous peoples have provided openings to alternative pasts, presents, and futures. Black and Indigenous liberation struggles informed by feminist and queer politics, as well as artistic production, and quotidian acts of survival and experimentation inspires her forthcoming scholarly and community building work.
brontë velez’s work/rest is guided by the call that “black wellness is the antithesis to state violence” (Mark Anthony Johnson). as a black-latinx transdisciplinary artist, trickster, jibarx and wakeworker, their eco-social art praxis lives at the intersections of black feminist placemaking, abolitionist theologies, environmental regeneration, and death doulaship. they embody this commitment through serving as creative director for Lead to Life and ecological educator for Weaving Earth. they are currently co-conjuring a mockumentary with esperanza spalding in collaboration with the San Francisco Symphony and practicing pastoral care as a co-steward of a land refuge in Kashia Pomo territory in California.
♫ The music for this episode is “Old Growth” and “Calving” by Jiordi Rosales and “In The Night” by Ashia Karana.
Episode References
In The Aura of a Hole by A. Laurie Palmer
Tao Leigh Goffe of Dark Laboratory
Jessica Marie Johnson and Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez of Electric Marronage
Decolonizing Diasporas by Yomaira C. Figueroa-Vásquez
Dirty South Manifesto by LaMonda Stallings
The Vel of Slavery by Jared Sexton
Tiffanty’s Recommendations
Tiya Miles and Sharon Patricia Holland, eds. Crossing waters, crossing worlds: The African diaspora in Indian country. Duke University Press, 2006.
Leanne Simpson Simpson. As we have always done: Indigenous freedom through radical resistance. U of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Frank B. Wilderson III. Red, white & black: Cinema and the structure of US antagonisms. Duke University Press, 2010.
“Temporary Spaces of Joy and Freedom” Leanne Simpson and Dionne Brand in conversation
Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead
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For The Wild Podcast is an anthology of the Anthropocene; focused on land-based protection, co-liberation and intersectional storytelling rooted in a paradigm shift away from human supremacy, endless growth and consumerism.