Introduction: Unsettle the Struggle, Trouble the Grounds

September 15, 2021 Posted by Webmaster under Volume 31 - Numbers 1 & 2 - September 2020 and January 2021

SA Smythe (bio)

The interrelated quest to map the unknown—the geographic unknown, the corporeal indigenous/black unknown—sets forth what Neil Smith calls “uneven development,” albeit from a very different analytical perspective: the systematic production of differential social hierarchies, which are inscribed in space and give a coherence to disproportionate geographies. —Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds

We, to paraphrase [Kamau Braithwaite], can make here, on these broken grounds . . . something torn and new . . . , a communal future of wholeness.—Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, “Kamau Brathwaite: The Voice of African Presence”

As Black feminist Barbara Smith notes in Marlon Riggs’s iconic film Black Is…Black Ain’t, “There are as many kinds of Black people as there are Black people to be. There are so many variations on this theme.” And for as many kinds of Black people as there are to be, there are also many kinds of relationships to place and to belonging. The study of the African diaspora—of the practices and experiences that teem across language, histories, and other attachments—points to an origin: to Africa or “the continent.” However, to those not committed to its study, this reference is often reduced and ideologically bound to enslavement and departure. This special issue is instigated and organized around this observation, and wonders: what to the African, Black, and Afro-descendant is indigeneity? What, to the Indigenous, is Black(ness)? We know well that the stakes of considering Blackness and Indigeneity together in epistemological relation are high, and certainly not singular. Nor are they discrete, despite the efforts (be they concerted or a result of ideological neglect) to make indigeneity cartographically and thus epistemologically implausible or unthinkable in a specifically Black African context.1

This inability to trace landed attachment to places perpetuate the notion of Afro-descended people’s nonbelonging, and the question of sovereignty and self-possession becomes ephemeralized. In this settler imaginary, who owns the land (which is already a white supremacist conceit: many Native authors have argued over generations that relation to rather than possession of land is the deeper intention of land acknowledgments or even Land Back demands) is utilized as a coercive cudgel with which to determine who is made to labor on the land and who can form and maintain knowledge over the land and place writ large as well as let themselves be known/knowable.2 Here we see the connection between racial capitalism and settler colonialism, as epistemological-material projects of genocide, super exploitation, and dispossession are always already linked. The representation of Africans as un-landed in cartographic renderings like Native Land is one of the proliferating examples of how Indigenous belonging has been removed from Blackness and Black people. This informs the tenuous relationship of Africans in the diaspora to Indigenous claims (for example, of Afro-descended peoples in places like the colonial United States where Africans were considered enslaved people and not people with Indigenous identity and the policing of those lines continues to impact our present day perceptions of incommensurability).3 Continuing down the path of unsedimenting the relationship between Blackness and landedness and the delimiting relationship of Indigenous peoples to their lands as the only measure through which to understand and afford or experience sovereignty is to trouble the grounds—to disturb the tasks, the conditions, and the terrain—of understanding and knowledge production on which Blackness and Indigeneity can be thought in multiscale and dynamic relation.

Situated as the contemporary vanguard of this settler structure of knowledge production, obstruction, and maintenance is the academic industrial complex in the United States in particular, which is founded on genocide, anti-Black racism, and other ongoing modes of dispossession. We see these formations in the land grant institutions built on stolen lands (such as the University of California) and in the fact that across Turtle Island, Black Studies and Native Studies programs and departments are forced to compete for the same scarce resources and encouraged to remain discrete units and bodies of knowledge, despite the realities on the ground and their shared relational histories. The matter of funding and employment also reveals the university’s commitment to racial capitalism, as it claims knowledge and control over Black life, mobility, and labor in multiple ways. As we wrote in “A Statement of Black Solidarity: Cops Off of Every Campus,” “[t]o these institutions, our truest value comes in times of crisis, when we are made to show up in the form of statistics, in the form of alibis, in the form of crisis managers. Diversity regimes and administrative bloat routinely serve as the veneer of Black value.”4

This special issue is inspired into an ecology of thinking that seeks to dwell in deep relation with the scholars, artists, and visionaries proliferating conversations between Black and/or Indigenous peoples that show an abiding need for tuning into and across difference to name the possibilities for our collective liberation. This inspiration also points to the proliferation of conversations beyond the white settler colonial gaze. Troubling the Grounds: Global Configurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity lingers over the perceived incommensurability of Black and Indigenous life, and has emerged as a result of many conversations, explorations, and indeed frustrations about the ways Black and Indigenous life wor(l)ds are taken up, buried, and mystified across various geographical contexts. It was the name of a conference held at the University of California, Irvine, in May 2019, that I co-organized with Dr. Sandra Harvey. The symposium was thus held on the homelands of the Tongva peoples who, in the face of ongoing settler colonialism, continue to act as stewards of their ancestral lands as they have for the past 8,000 years. As Black visitors to the land, we moved with curiosity about the possibilities for connection. The greater Los Angeles area is home to some of the largest Indigenous populations in the United States. It is the ancestral homeland of the Tongva, the Acjachemen, the Chumash, the Tataviam, the Cahuilla nations, the Chemehuevi, the Pipa Aha Macav, the Morongo, the Pechanga, the Yuhaaviatam, and the Soboba among many other peoples. It is also presently home to large communities of Indigenous peoples from the greater Turtle Island, the Pacific Islands, and Latin America, including Zapotec and Mixtec peoples.

Black people, like Garífuna communities, or like the Miskito people, whether in diaspora or in Central America, continue to claim Indigeneity even when it is regarded as contentious or untenable. The questions of the physical, spatial (landed), and other articulations of sovereignty are interrelated. How can Africanness be thought not alongside Indigenous cultures, communities, and politics, but as itself Indigenous, with all of the rights, freedoms, and unsettling that this might engender? Ultimately, we sought to bring our attention to Black/African Indigeneity and Black/African decolonial solidarity as practiced in various regions of the globe.

This convening was motivated by a curiosity about theories of sovereignty and Black/African political imaginaries: by shared cosmologies, solidarities, and coalitions across difference between Indigenous peoples and people of the African diaspora and on the continent. We wondered how we might problematize blood quantum or other biological/racial understandings of indigeneity historically and in the contemporary moment, and about the role of indigeneity in Black political struggle in various regions of Africa and Latin America. Panelists and discussants came together to consider how the “idea of Africa” circulates in Native American and Indigenous studies and communities, as well as how and where the continent occupies the Black American imaginary and its own intra-migration stories within its own borders.5 In this generative discursive space, we brought together the study of settler colonialism and postcoloniality to bear witness to trenchant critiques of citizenship and human rights, recognizing the political import of what “native” or “indigenous” might mean in specific geopolitical and geotemporal contexts, and grappling with the unyielding violence of settler colonial white supremacy, racial capitalism, and imperialism.

The title of our special issue is drawn from the incisive thought of Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, in which McKittrick sets a foundational course for ways we might think about racialized geographies, temporalities, and modes of political opposition to colonialism. Her work prompted us to rethink the very ideological grounds on which our assumptions, ideologies, and claims to liberation rest. McKittrick urges us to think through how blackness and geography animate new ways of imagining the world; her book, she writes, “is, in its broadest sense, an interdisciplinary analysis of black women’s geographies in the black diaspora. It seeks to consider what kinds of possibilities emerge when black studies encounters human geography” (x). Troubling the Grounds: Global Figurations of Blackness, Indigeneity & Nativism considers what kinds of possibilities emerge when Black Studies, Native Studies, African Studies, and global Indigenous Studies meet. In this volume, writers across various disciplinary formations and geopolitical commitments build upon ongoing intellectual and activist conversations about racism, racial capitalism, and (settler) colonialisms in order to refigure our conversations through a global lens.

As a point of departure, let us reconsider what happens on a material and epistemological level when we return to Africa rather than to the world of whiteness in these conversations and conflicts. How might centering Africa—with differing and non-syncretic ideas of the continent and its variegated colonial histories, contemporary political struggles, innovative joys—impact narratives of belonging, citizenship, nativism, migration, and indigeneity across Europe, Turtle Island, Oceania, and Abya Yala? Likewise, in what ways do questions around settler colonialism and anti-Black racism in the so-called West help or hinder our understanding of anticolonial or decolonial debates and struggles in various African contexts? Katherine McKittrick’s reading of Sylvia Wynter’s term “grounds” allows us to think critically of diasporic, Indigenous, and nomadic ways of living in the world not as mutually exclusive states of being but possibly as simultaneous spatial and temporal relationships. McKittrick offers us this provocation:

If these conceptual and political differences are not simply cast as marginal, they do not have to replicate marginality. Demonic grounds are not, then, only reifying and politicizing marginality in itself (black women’s identities = margin/position = difference in/and feminism; or, our present form of life). Rather they are also a projection of what the biocentric human (genres of black womanhood) means in relation to “the normally inhabitable.” (135)

The grounds have always been troubled, and we wade into the conversation in search of otherwise possibilities for understanding and place.

Both at the “Troubling the Grounds” symposium and throughout this volume (which also contains essays from scholars who were not involved in those sessions), there is an abiding interest in the ways blackness travels, is mobilized, or is (re)coded within discourses of indigeneity, citizenship, and sovereignty, where recognizable relationships to the state are determined. Of course, overdetermined positionalities (including the triad of the arrivant/diasporic subject/migrant, the native, and the settler/colonizer) are rooted in ideologies that shape all of our political responses. Troubling the Grounds opens with the imperative that we develop and continue strategies of solidarity that carefully and critically tend to the ways our deeply held narratives of belonging are brought to bear on each other. Thus, these essays center Africa, the African diaspora, and Blackness in the collective conversation, while understanding these terms (especially “Blackness”) to be expansive and mutable depending on how they are geopolitically and historically situated. There is attention to the trouble, the tensions, and tautness of ideological and physical relations that we seek to tease out. The volume is an effort to draw out that set of relations and attachments but by no means to totalize the territory. There continues to be a growing body of scholarship about the relationship between Black Studies and/in/of Native Studies that this volume moves alongside and shifts away from, we hope in generative ways.6

Put differently, this special issue of Postmodern Culture moves with the understanding that indigeneity, diaspora, and migration are racial-ethno-political categories emerging differently across geopolitical contexts. In Europe, for example, the Sámi people inhabiting parts of what is now Scandinavia are readily classified as Indigenous to those lands, whereas the Romani (including Roma and Sinti peoples) are often conflated with nomadic tribes. Rather than being understood as Indigenous, these groups often experience a process of what Alyosxa Tudor calls “migratization.”7 Likewise, “Indigenous” as a political identity is mobilized asymmetrically throughout the continent of Africa, Central America, and various other regions, despite various peoples’ historic claims to tribal or ancestral lands. Given these different geopolitical locations—what Keguro Macharia describes in the afterword to this issue as the attendant geohistories—from Turtle Island to the diasporic homes of the Garínagu to what is today known as Namibia and to Melanesia, the authors in this volume contribute to a discussion about the ways in which race, ethnicity, and history have informed our understandings of indigeneity, blackness, and mobility, as well as the political claims these categories make possible or foreclose in their respective contexts, and for Africa and its diaspora. Not featured here, but also deeply in conversation and present at that Spring 2019 conference were engagements with Palestine, the quilombos of Brazil, migrants and Roma across Europe, and Blackscapes across the Indian Ocean, Asian, and Arab worlds. The grounds of all of these spaces are demonic, and we owe a debt of gratitude to these thinkers and contributors for their offerings as we collectively sought a way out of epistemic and ontological barriers to our knowing one another and ourselves.

Also not included in this issue is the way that whiteness positions itself as having access to indigeneity in places like Europe. The topic came up for vociferous debate during the conference, and is implicated in these conversations. In recent years, the deadly fever pitch of ultranationalist calls to greatness has taken up a frail form of sovereignty based on a nostalgic act of white return, which is tied to the supremacist narrative of “the great replacement” in France, in particular.8 Take, for example, Donald Trump’s slogan to “Make America Great Again,” which begat ideologically linked global campaigns like Jair Bolsonaro’s “Make Brazil Great Again,” and Matteo Salvini’s “Make Italy Great Again” and “Italians First,” and Boris Johnson’s promise to “make Britain great again” by forcing the United Kingdom out of the European Union. They share a desire to recuperate an originary colonial project of the nation as individualist imperial formation. The discourse retrenches white supremacist iterations of History and Time to harken back to nebulous and fictional moment of ethnoracial purity and coeval peace. When confronting the political and ethnoracial diversity of the present, this of course foments anti-immigrant, anti-Black, and anti-Indigenous movements, in great part because they promote a revisionist history that celebrates white cisheterosexual people as the rightful claimants to the land and therefore to the status of “native.” “Nativism” in this perverse context then refers to a return to whiteness, and thus, a return that renders impossible any other claims to sovereignty in favor of white ethnonationalist politics of recognition and of fantasies of belonging.

The pieces in this volume should be read as rigorous engagements in their own right, and we are invited to “read as amateurs” to consider a relationship to knowledge and its production as divested from notions of mastery.9 We do this in order to look at our principles and orientations towards diaspora, to name who we are and how we fellowship with one another, foregrounding interrelatedness and our own stories. With this invocation of “we,” these works join Kānaka Maoli scholar Lisa Kahaleole Hall’s moratorium “on talking about ‘them,’ so we can talk about ‘we’s’” from her 2018 Critical Ethnic Studies essay “More than ‘Two Worlds,’” forged with Black feminist activism, scholarship, and poetry about relating across difference (77). She continues, “The violences that we can effectively stop are those that are employed within a “we.” The existence of that “we” is necessary but not sufficient for making change—it is the ground of possibility” (78).

There was rousing poetry, theory, land blessings, and scholarship presented at the Troubling the Grounds conference and considered for this issue that addressed the relationship between indigenous South Africans and the geocosmogenic waywardness of their ancestry; Black African and Palestinians relations after the Second World War; insurgent knowledges of freedom-making from the quilombos of Brazil; spatial performances of the Indian Ocean Blackness of Ceylon Africans in Sri Lanka; the migratization of Eastern European in the interest of troubling attachments to nativism and whiteness, and so on. There are many limits of a special issue including the number of included essays. However, if we take up the spirit of curiosity and resist exclusionary readings as ones of bad faith and misrecognition, it will allow us to consider where we might deepen our study, stretch our political engagement, and peek beyond the horizon of our struggles, toward what Lisa Kahaleole Hall refers to as “the lateral sharing of difference within multiple consensually constructed ‘we’s’” (81). This work is ongoing. The struggle continues.

This issue opens with “Other Intimacies: Black Studies Notes on Native/Indigenous Studies,” a grounding conversation between Chad Infante, Sandra Harvey, Kelly Limes Taylor, and Tiffany Lethabo King that stretches across multiple exchanges, continents, and itineraries between Black Studies and Native Studies. After these scholars push beyond the confines of multiple fields to extend our collective investment and to tarry with Blackness as more than an agon for thinking sovereignty, belonging, and indigeneity, Sarah Fong’s “The Grounds of Encounter: Racial and Colonial Discourses of Place” historicizes the ongoing struggle against colonial geographies of separation and extraction in the 19th century United States and 21st century solidarities between Native and Black peoples at the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust on traditionally Chochenyo and Karkin lands in the San Francisco Bay Area. By troubling the temporality of association, Fong resists the cleaving of Black Studies and Native Studies that fuels the settler imaginary and racial illogics to meditate on placelessness as co-constitutive of Black and Native experiences and renderings. In “The Politics of Witchcraft and the Politics of Blood: Reading Sovereignty and Sociality in the Livingstone Museum,” Alírio Karina presents witchcraft as an object and cosmology that troubles the colonial and anthropological tendencies of contemporary African Studies. Examining witchcraft objects held at the Livingstone Museum in Zambia, Karina reflects on indigenous-coded claims to territory, custom, and Africanity, and offers a critique of limited readings of witchcraft that move away from the materiality of its real cosmologies, readings that reflect a colonizing tendency, arguing instead for the agency of Indigenous Africans who exceed their postcolonial containers in pursuit of sovereignty. Where Karina engages Indigenous Africans as disruptive of colonial framings of African identity and belonging, Paul Joseph López Oro’s articulations of Black Central America on the isthmus and its diasporas build on centuries of anti-Black racism and genocidal erasure to argue that Garifuna New Yorkers of Honduran descent are marked by their transgenerational differences and bounded by a “Garifunaness” that seeks to disrupt hegemonic Latinidad and refashion Afro-Latinidad through indigeneity. Sandra Harvey offers another framing of the spatialization of Black and Native life through epistemological, phenomenological, and metaphysical turns. Like Fong’s “placelessness,” Harvey’s notion of unsettling moves us to think about the binary of Black displacement, which Katherine McKittrick refers to as “ungeographic,” in “Unsettling Diasporas: Blackness, Solidarity Ethics, and the Specter of Indigeneity.” As Fong does in her work on Black and Native solidarities and resistance, Joy Enomoto situates the work of Melanesian women artists and activists to push our thinking of material solidarity and political possibility. “Black is the Color of Solidarity: Art as Resistance in Melanesia” articulates Black Oceania and the Black Pacific as bounded sites of possibility that are thought materially, and not merely as conceptual containers for inter-community epistemologies and praxis. Zoé Samudzi’s incisive engagement, “A Paradox of Genocide Recognition,” thinks across solidarity and recognition with another refractive reading of history. Offering a comparatively political assessment of Germany’s legal response to the 1904–1908 genocide of the Nama and Herero indigenous Africans the Civil Rights Congress’s 1951 We Charge Genocide petition to the United Nations, Samudzi names anti-Blackness as the litmus case and limit of modern understandings and acknowledgements of colonial genocide, arguing that the result is a deep paradox of recognition that is not only commensurate with Black death, but renders it a pre-requisite. Concluding the volume is a generous afterword by Keguro Macharia, “Afterword: Across Difference, Toward Freedom,” that furthers the call to listen, to attend, and to dwell in and across these seemingly divergent contexts in order to pull together through-lines and repetitions toward a collective understanding of the anti-Blackness that structures this modern world, the Black livingness that exceeds categorization through independent containment away from “the Indigenous” or “the Native.”

Engaging with the relational lived experiences and struggles of Black and African people in this way may yield a deepening of conversations in which Blackness and Indigeneity are thought about with a curiosity that is not merely transactional solidarity, is not antagonistic, and is not concerned with incommensurability, but rather pushes us to consider shared access to struggles against and experiences of ontological oppression, dispossession, and erasure. This special issue holds together approaches across and beyond the geopolitical, historiographical, or conjectural analysis, beyond literary criticism, visual art, and performance. It’s an ongoing conversation that resists the overdetermination of form and genre and the imposition of rigid forms. Deep gratitude to Postmodern Culture managing editor Annie Moore for her steadfastness in seeing this volume through to its culmination, delayed many times by racialized responses to COVID-19, American insurrections, demands of the neoliberal university, and ecological disaster that in many ways underscored the importance of attending to the matter of Indigenous and Black belonging deeply enough to forge a world that we can ultimately thrive in. Further gratitude to Postmodern Culture editor Eyal Amiran for supporting this effort since it was a burgeoning idea turned conference, and understanding that what might normatively be said to be “historical” work must be stretched when we think materially about what constitutes “history,” given the unfixed temporality and ongoing colonialisms (settler and otherwise) and ongoing catastrophe of racial capitalism and other racisms on Turtle Island, Abya Yala, Mzansi, Europe and other lands.

Every iteration of “crisis” affords us the opportunity to reconfigure the grounds. Perhaps the time is nigh for us to ask: what, to young children Tree and Delisha Africa, or to the hundreds of precious Native children whose remains are routinely and tragically being discovered in mass graves around residential schools across Turtle Island, is an institutional land acknowledgment? May we continue to trouble the grounds of discipline/disciplinarity, of ontology, of capital, and of w(h)it(e)ness, by nurturing the shoals of transformation (of fields, of possibility) that refuse to settle. 10

Dr. SA Smythe is a poet, translator, and assistant professor of Black European Cultural Studies and Black Trans Poetics at UCLA, where they are primarily invested in Black belonging beyond borders. They are the guest editor of Troubling the Grounds: Global Configurations of Blackness, Nativism, and Indigeneity in Postmodern Culture, the forthcoming monograph Where Blackness Meets the Sea: On Crisis, Culture, and the Black Mediterranean, and the full poetry collection titled proclivity, which takes up a familial history of Black migration (between Britain, Costa Rica, Jamaica, and Italy), trans embodiment, and Black liberation. Smythe is a statewide coordinating committee member of the faculty wing of California Cops Off Campus (UCFTP) and organizes with students and other comrades in the broader Cops Off Campus Coalition and other abolitionist/anti-carceral groups across Turtle Island and in Europe. Winner of the 2021 Rome Prize, Smythe is currently based between Rome, Italy and Tongva Land.

Footnotes

1. I am thinking here of the many recent projects originating in the West that set about to map indigenous territories with the expressed aim to inform “non-indigenous” people about the surrounding occupied lands and their original and ongoing stewards. At the time of this writing, the app and website Native Land (native-land.ca), founded by self-identified Canadian settler Victor Temprano, “strives to create and foster conversations about the history of colonialism, Indigenous ways of knowing, and settler-Indigenous relations, through educational resources such as our map and Territory Acknowledgement Guide.” The project, which features “indigenous and non-indigenous” people, also boasts an ardent community that crowdsources information across the Americas and Europe, and contains almost no Indigenous representation on the African continent. The site privileges “‘Indigenous way of knowing’ when it comes to the importance and sacredness of land,” which begs the question: what are we to understand about what the Indigenous African knows?

2. On the Land Back Movement, see https://landback.org/manifesto/.

3. For more on the history and legacy of racial purity and its impact on the relations between African Americans and Native Americans, see the work of Arica L. Coleman, in particular That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia.

4. See Sarah Haley, Nick Mitchell, Shana Redmond, and SA Smythe, “A Statement of Black Solidarity: Cops Off of Every Campus,” written for the California Cops Off Campus Coalition.

5. See Mudimbe, The Idea of Africa.

6. The shift “away” is still ever in relation, and the privileging of “Indigenous” throughout this introduction is meant to indicate a set of entanglements including and beyond Turtle Island, that involve land and temporality, which Native Studies, peoples, and possibilities also attend to.

7. See Tudor, “Cross-fadings of racialization and migratization.”

8. The latter anti-Semitic and Islamophobic conspiracy developed by white nationalist writer Renaud Camus argues for the existence of an ongoing plot for “white genocide” that is being carried out by replacing the demographics and culture of white Europeans with non-white people, globalized culture, and transnational ideals.

9. In “Beyond Incommensurability: Toward an Otherwise Stance on Black and Indigenous Relationality,” the introduction to Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith outline three typical articulations of the relations between “Black and Native peoples and, by extension, Black and Native politics” as being articulated “sometimes in terms of presumed solidarity or comparison,” sometimes “in terms of antagonism,” and “nowadays … in terms of incommensurability, which asserts a lack of commonality/relationality between Black and Native folks.” They go on to unpack the Glissantian notion of “relation” to move us beyond a binary formation rooted in a white supremacist settler imaginary that maintains the separation of Black and Indigenous communities from one another, by rendering the Native person knowable in a fixed and erstwhile positionality and the Black person unthought, excessive to the point of obscurity, or utterly present without any historical attachment to the land. The introduction goes on to set the intention for their volume, which is to resist the disavowal of this relation and instead to move toward an “approach that does not presume an ‘answer’ but instead seeks to ask question about the complexities of this relation and hence the political possibilities that emerge” (2). Shortly after the time of this writing (May 2021), ongoing controversy about the claims to Native identity finally punctuated mainstream academic consciousness due to the publication of a longform article on the Native claims of Andrea Smith. In many Native (feminist) spaces, this has been an object of vocal concern for over a decade. We cannot ethically ignore this reality, and the untold harms caused. However, I refuse a politics of public disposability for the Black, Indigenous, and Native scholarship present in that volume, which has been truly generative to my thinking, and whose total refutation would in certain instances compound harm and avoid the key contributions of its arguments. Independent of Otherwise Worlds, conversations about the global effects of settler colonialism and the global materialities forged from racism must continue to unfold and not be dismissed along with one individual’s pretend claims to Native identity. In fact, anti-Blackness fuels the untenability and incredulity plaguing Black/African claims to Indigenous belonging around the world, and as such propel the desire to corral scholarship like the work presented in this volume. Questions about embodied, geographic, and most other forms of sovereignty remain.

10. See King, The Black Shoals.

Works Cited

  • Coleman, Arica L. That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans, and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia. Indiana UP, 2013.
  • Haley, Sarah, Nick Mitchell, Shana Redmond, and SA Smythe. “A Statement of Black Solidarity: Cops Off of Every Campus.” Written for the California Cops Off Campus Coalition. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YQC9I50KdrsK3tt5cQrWFIPossizQisDCisO57Bhoac/edit. Accessed 3 May 2021.
  • Hall, Lisa Kahaleole. “More than ‘Two Worlds’: Black Feminist Theories of Difference in Relation.” Critical Ethnic Studies Journal Special Issue: The Academy and What Can Be Done, vol. 4, no. 1, Spring 2018, 64–83.
  • King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Duke UP, 2019.
  • ———, Jenell Navarro, and Andrea Smith. “Beyond Incommensurability: Toward an Otherwise Stance on Black and Indigenous Relationality.” Introduction, Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, Duke UP, 2020, pp.1–23.
  • McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. U of Minnesota P, 2006.
  • Mudimbe, V.Y. The Idea of Africa. Currey, 2005.
  • Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. “Kamau Brathwaite: The Voice of African Presence.” World Literature Today, vol. 68, no. 4, 1994, pp. 677–682. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40150609.
  • Tudor, Alyosxa. “Cross-fadings of racialisation and migratisation: the postcolonial turn in Western European gender and migration studies.” Gender, Place & Culture, vol. 25, no. 7, 2018, pp. 1057–1072. DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2018.1441141