A Note on Method and Guiding Questions
Reading across a wide range of literary, visual, and textual forms, I am particularly drawn towards considering the interplay of three different theoretical concepts — “the oral impulse, the graphic impulse, and the critical impulse” — as laid out by Christoper Teuton in Deep Waters (Teuton xiv). While standards of literacy or orality have traditionally determined readerly approaches to Native American literary studies, Teuton observes that Indigenous forms of signification value both “oral and graphic means of recording thought, but privilege neither” (xvi). Moreover, this kind of exploration of form draws on multiple sensibilities, which engages with both the affective and effective value of studying literary and artistic form while honoring to the the practices through which literary history is preserved and remembered amongst Indigenous communities. In other words, a dynamic interplay across different disciplinary and formal modes of reading, questions the central assumptions and authority of dominant discourse, while looking for newer possibilities of cultivating Black Indigenous relations as fluid, ever changing, and central to Indigenous cultural production.
Similarly, while addressing the dynamic nature of Black-Indigenous relations, it might be helpful to explicitly name desire as the affective and social modality through which much of the Black and Indigenous relations in this exhibit are conceived, realized, and mediated. My attention towards desire draws on Tiffany Lethabo King’s effort to think about the bodies of literature about Black and Native erotics, sexualities, and decolonization together to have a “conversation about Black and Indigenous relationality that exceed the notion of the coalition as a conceptual and political space of impasse” (King 143). Conversations around Black and Indigenous coalition, solidarity, or alliance often occur in the abstract and deeply ignore the the particular conversations how, why, and who people chose to love, have sex with/fuck, build a life with, or choose to be in community with, which are equally significant terrains for political and social negotiation. In fact, my insistence to read the materiality of relation through desire while insisting on desire’s constitution by coloniality, race, and orientalism resists the pull of multiculturalism utopian fantasies by dwelling on the discomfort and indeterminacy that desire produces. As King writes,
“ These erotic relationships might offer clues to how relationships with one another — across race — function in ways that reveal some of the problems, constraints, and promises of these erotic forms of solidarity work…The erotic space is perhaps a more accurate and reliable snapshot of how people work out (or do not work out) day-to-day struggles to affirm Black and Native life in relation to or in conflict with the political demands of their White of people-of-color lovers. These decisions can no longer remain private in our political lives” (King 149)
Put otherwise, the texture of intersubjective relations, as made evident in the readings of Shoeboots, Webber, and Brown, provide an insight into reading the intimacy of Black and Indigenous relation as not one without strife or conflict. In fact, it necessarily requires a considerations of the enslaved status as property to be held in tension with the Indigenous claims to citizenship; the idea of intercommunal harmony to be challenged by histories of anti-Black exclusion; and finally, the scope and limitations of queerness in communicating the assertion of Blackness and Indigeneity, even within countercultural spheres.
Guiding Questions
- Can historicizing Black and Indigenous desire provide textual ground for theorizing the affective undercurrents of sovereignty, citizenship, and kinship?
- What are the formal and aesthetic negotiations undertaken by Black Indigenous writers and artists to exhibit the complexities of Black and Indigenous relation? Explain the erotics of these relations, and how it influences your understanding of kinship, sovreignity, and relationality.
- In what ways does tracing the history of an affect like desire depart from providing a material ground for conceiving Black and Indigenous relation? Why is the turn to affect important to Black and Indigenous relations?