Indg 2015 week 6 public

Week 6
INDG 2015: Indigenous Ecological
Ways of Knowing
October 14, 2020
Introduction to Environmental Knowledges in
The Caribbean and the TransAtlantic
Dr. Zoe Todd
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2020

Class outline
The Caribbean
- Tiffany Lethabo King The Black Shoals,
Introduction
- Christina Sharpe In the Wake, Chapter 2
- Sarah Vaughn: Disappearing Mangroves: The
Epistemic Politics of Climate Adaptation in
Guyana
Portfolio overview

§ Today we are covering the violent, traumatic
histories of displacement, genocide, and
enslavement of African peoples in the
western hemisphere, and the concurrent
experiences of North American Indigenous
displacement and genocide. Some of the
material is very heavy, so I want to provide a
trigger warning for students with embodied
connections to these mass violations
through community/historical/ancestral ties

§ Tiffany Lethabo King brings us into deeply
rooted and storied work on African
diasporic peoples, communities, histories
in the Caribbean, the USA, and Canada by
examining the concept of The Black Shoals

What is a shoal?
§ “In oceanography, geomorphology, and earth sciences, a shoal is a natural
submerged ridge, bank, or bar that consists of, or is covered by, sand or other
unconsolidated material, and rises from the bed of a body of water to near the
surface. Often it refers to those submerged ridges, banks, or bars that rise
near enough to the surface of a body of water as to constitute a danger to
navigation. Shoals are also known as sandbanks, sandbars, or gravelbars.
Two or more shoals that are either separated by shared troughs or
interconnected by past or present sedimentary and hydrographic processes
are referred to as a shoal complex.[1][2]
§ The term shoal is also used in a number of ways that can be either similar or
quite different from how it is used in the geologic, geomorphic, and
oceanographic literature. Sometimes, this term refers to either any relatively
shallow place in a stream, lake, sea, or other body of water; a rocky area on
the sea floor within an area mapped for navigation purposes; a growth of
vegetation on the bottom of a deep lake that occurs at any depth; and as a
verb for the process of proceeding from a greater to a lesser depth of
water.[2]” Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoal

The Black Shoals -- King
“Shoals in the Tsangpo (Brahmaputra) River, Tibet Autonomous Region, China”
https://www.britannica.com/science/shoal/images-videos

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6pHpRF
oihIE
Example of a shoal

§ Why does King invoke the concept of the
shoal in this work?
§ “By titling this book The Black Shoals, I posit that Black thought, Black
study, Black aesthetics, and Black expression function as a shoal that
interrupts the course and momentum of the flow of critical theories
about genocide, slavery, and humanity in the Western Hemisphere.
More specifically, the book intervenes in contemporary discourses
and theories of colonialism and settler colonialism in North America
that dictate how the academy and “the left” talk about (or do not talk
about) Indigenous genocide, Indigenous peoples, settlers, arrivants,
and Black people.” (King 2019, p. xv)

North America:
- 23 countries
- 9 dependent territories
- Puerto Rico
- US Virgin Islands
- Bermuda
- Greenland
- Cayman Islands
- Turks and Caicos
- British Virgin Islands
- Anguilla
- Montserrat
https://geology.com/world/north-america-satellite-image.shtml
https://www.whatarethe7continents.com/north-
american-continent/many-countries-north-
america/

The Caribbean
https://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/map/Caribbean-political-map.htm Copyright Professor Zoe Todd 2020

§ “Genocide and slavery do not have an edge.
While the force of their haunt has distinct
feelings at the stress points and
instantiations of Black fungibility and Native
genocide, the violence moves as one. To
perceive this distinct yet edgeless violence
and its haunting requires a way of sensing
that allows moving in and out of blurred and
sharpened vision, acute and dulled senses of
smell.” (King 2019: x)
Tiffany Lethabo King – the Black
Shoals

Colliding genocides
§ “Under relations of conquest, Black and
Indigenous people made difficult and agonizing
choices when it came to negotiating and fighting
for their existence. Often when Black and
Indigenous people encountered one another their
meetings were mediated by the violence of an
evolving humanism organized through their
captivity and death.5 The terms of survival—or,
said another way, the circumstances under which
you as a Black or Indigenous person lived—were
often tethered to the death of the Other.” (King
2019, p. xi )

Transatlantic Enslavement
§ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lnqhd
Nxqmpc&ab_channel=BBCWhat%E2%80%
99sNew%2FActuJeunes

The Middle Passage: 1440-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Passage
- 9.4 to 12 million
enslaved Africans
forcibly brought to the
New World through the
Middle Passage

The Middle Passage, con’t
Trigger warning: graphic depictions of experiences of
enslaved people through the Middle Passage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0IJrhQE6DZk&ab_ch
annel=HISTORY

“What my unnamed ancestors knew of slavery
was life and world-altering. They knew of a terror
that exceeded the memory and understanding of
what we think we know of slavery. I do not
believe that genocide and slavery can be
contained. Neither has edges, yet each is
distinct. Each form of violence has its own way
of contaminating, haunting, touching, caressing,
and whispering to the other. Their force is
particular yet like liquid, as they can spill and
seep into the spaces that we carve out as bound
off and untouched by the other.” (King, p. x)
Tiffany Lethabo King – the Black
Shoals

§ Sit with this question that King poses in the
text:
| “what happens—or needs to happen conceptually—when
Black diasporic people, aesthetics, and politics land and
encounter Native peoples’ cosmologies and resistance to
conquest?” (King 2019, p. 8)
• Indigenous peoples and Black communities are often framed as
separate groups in Canada and the USA, which can erase Black-
Indigenous, Afro-Indigenous peoples
• King’s work invites care-full examinations across histories of
genocide, enslavement, displacement in/of African nations and the
experiences of Indigenous peoples in North America
• What does it look like to displace the logics of white supremacy
that are at the root of the horrors of colliding white supremacist
genocides in Africa, North America and South America?

§ Drawing on the work of Kamau Braithwaite’s
tidalectics, King reminds us:
| “First, tidalectics confound the binary and dialectical thinking
that would separate ocean from land and render Black people
and Indigenous people as an antagonism.” -- King, 2019, p. 7
King – The Black Shoals

Learning questions
§ Reflect on the history of Indigenous and
Black communities where you currently
are situated.
§ How are these relations connected to the
lands/waters/atmospheres of place?
§ What does environmental relationality
look like in your current home/place if we
acknowledge “genocide and slavery do
no have an edge”? (King 2019, x)

§ “The Black Shoals arrests settler
colonialism’s tendency to resuscitate
older liberal humanist modes of thought
to create new poststructural and
postmodern forms of violent humanisms
that feed off Indigenous genocide and
Black social death.” (King p. 10)

King The Black Shoals
§ Settler vs Conquest
§ Conquistador-settler relationship
| “Even if people of color (or non-Black and non-
Indigenous) can over time occupy the structural position
of the “settler,” then critical social theory needs another
name for the position previously held by the white
settler. If postcolonial subjects, former “Natives” and
racialized others, can become the settler, then the white
settler has continued to occupy the structural and
ontological position of the conquistador, and should be
named as such” (King 2019 xii)

Canada and the Middle Passage
§ Canada does have a history of
enslavement, despite efforts by
white settlers to erase this
“Enslavement was
introduced by French
colonists in New
France in the early
1600s, and lasted until it
was abolished
throughout British North
America in 1834.”–
Natasha Henry
https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/bla
ck-
enslavement?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhIGB9oS_5QI
VRb7ACh25DgpBEAAYASAAEgLf0_D_BwE

§ “Canadian racial discourses prioritize the
settler-Indigenous binary and subordinate—
erase—the nation’s own history of slavery
and anti-Black racism through a Canadian
project of multiculturalism that focuses on
assimilating (Black) immigrants into its
national project.4” (King 2019, 13)
Refusing the binaries of white
colonizer nation-states
Copyright Professor Zoe Todd
2020

Learning question
§ How do we think King’s principle of the
Shoals into being across territorial,
political, geographic, historical tensions?
2020

Sharpe In the Wake, Chapter 2
§ https://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/in-the-
wake-a-salon-in-honor-of-christina-sharpe/
2020

Sharpe, In the Wake, Chapter 2
Sharpe, Chapter 2, p.30
2020

Sharpe’s Trans*Atlantic as
environmental relationality:
§ “we might add that the Black and queer
Atlantic have always been the Trans*Atlantic.”
(p. 30)
§ “As we hold on to the many meanings of
Trans* we can and must think and imagine
laterally, across a series of relations in the
ship, the hold, the wake, and the weather—in
multiple Black everydays”(p. 32)
2020

Sharpe’s Trans*Atlantic as
environmental relationality:
§ “Theorizing wake work requires a turn away
from existing disciplinary solutions to
blackness’s ongoing abjection that extend
the dysgraphia of the wake. It requires
theorizing the multiple meanings of that
abjection through inhabita-tion, that is,
through living them in and as
consciousness.” (p. 33)
2020

§ Histories of enslavement and the ‘afterlife
of slavery’ (Hartman, cited in Sharpe 2016)
shape lands/waters/atmospheres – these
have been touched upon in today’s class
with citations from Kamau Braithwaite,
Tiffany Lethabo King, Christina Sharpe.
There are many other scholars to draw
upon. Important to consider the ways
human experiences of genocide,
resistance, survival shape
place/time/being
Mid-class summary

Vaughn: Disappearing
Mangroves
This article explores the Guyanese Mangrove
Restoration Project (GMRP)

Vaughn, paragraph 2
§ "In 2010 the Guyanese government announced the launch of the GMRP.
As a response to the threat of sea-level rise, the GMRP looks to
mangroves for storm protection. The program is partially funded by the
European Union’s Global Climate Change Alliance, which complements
UN climate treaties by supporting national-level research about climate
adaptation. For engineers more familiar with seawalls than mangroves as
defense against the sea, the GMRP entails a particularly broad-based
research program into mangrove ecosystems. It focuses on exploring how
and why processes of erosion impinge on forests. These research
questions have put engineers in unorthodox partnerships with other
technoscientific experts, including geoscientists analyzing mudbanks,
environmental consultants cultivating trees, and beekeepers developing
apiaries. This is not to say that their combined efforts always prove
effective—they are, in fact, often thwarted by a variety of things like
waves, mud, and debris. In Guyana’s forests, climate adaptation requires
expertise that can reconcile humans’ and nonhumans’ entangled and
increasingly insecure futures.”
2020

§ Colonization, enslavement, and plantations
changed Guyana’s landscapes:
§ “Beginning in the late seventeenth century,
Dutch colonists imported slaves from Africa,
while British colonists later brought in more
slaves and indentured laborers from India,
Portugal, and China to cultivate sugar. Since,
flood management has been tied to sugar
plantations’ elaborate canal and sea-defense
grid.” (Vaughn, paragraph 10)
2020

The importance of paying
attention to nonhuman beings
§ “Alongside engineers, Nicholas was learning to pay attention
to things mangroves pay attention to, even if those things
challenged his assumptions about inter- and intraspecies
living. With shore-walk observations in mind, he began to
change his views on mangrove regeneration. He now granted
that mangrove regeneration was far more complex than he
had initially thought and not primarily dependent on mudbank
migration events. In consultation with the engineers, he
decided that it was not necessary to refine the SWAN model
to move forward with the GMRP. Instead, the participants
would focus on forest mapping and tree planting to improve
sea defense and their understandings of the shore.” (Vaughn,
paragraph 33)
2020

§ ”People often think that a
mangrove is just a tree . . .
but I mean a community of
plants growing along the
shore—a mangle of forests.”
§ (Vaughn, paragraph 45)
2020

§ “it is also incumbent on us to consider what
constitutes expertise and how this question
materializes across a vulnerable planet.”
2020

W
§ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFJXTYckZEg&
ab_channel=GCCACommunity
“it is also incumbent on us
to consider what
constitutes expertise and
how this question
materializes across a
vulnerable planet.”
(Vaughn, 2017 )
Watch this video with the above quote in mind: how is ‘expertise’
about nonhuman beings (mangroves) produced in climate change
mitigation work? Whose voices are centred? Whose voices are
excluded? How does this reflect histories in the region?

Portfolio
Step 1 – name
Step 2 – fill in 10 scholarly sources
Step 3 – write your 500 word summary
Rubric has been posted to
CuLearn
I’ve posted a link to a CuPortfolio template
that you can use as a guide

Final reflection question
How do King’s concept of The Black Shoals,
Sharpe’s concept of the Trans*Atlantic, and
Vaughn’s studies of climate change
mitigation expertise inform your
understandings of environmental
relationships? How can you bring trans-
continental/trans-regional understandings of
human-environmental relations into your
current work?

Indg 2015 week 6 public

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