Papers by Tiffany Lethabo King
Parapraxis, Issue 4, Security, 2024
Safundi, 2024
A long gown with large loose sleeves worn by monks or priests. Also occasionally, a cassock. Old ... more A long gown with large loose sleeves worn by monks or priests. Also occasionally, a cassock. Old English, 1350frock, v. Transitive. To dress a person in a frock (in various senses of frock, n.); to provide with a frock. Also, figurative. 1610-Smock-frock, n. A loose-fitting garment of coarse linen or the like, worn by farm-labourers over or instead of a coat and usually reaching to mid-leg or lower. a1800frockless, adj. Without a frock (in various senses of frock, n.); not wearing a frock.
Resonance: The Journal of Sound and Culture, 2024
The article uses sound-specifically Black music, traces of Mvskoke Creek ceremonial music, and so... more The article uses sound-specifically Black music, traces of Mvskoke Creek ceremonial music, and sound waves generated millions of years ago during the orogeny that produced the mountains in the region-to reorient the author to her mountain climb up the infamous Stone Mountain (Georgia, USA). The author takes up the listening practices informed by Dylan Robinson's and Katherine McKittrick's refusal in Hungry Listening (2020) and Dear Science and Other Stories (2021) to capture, know, or make Black and Indigenous sound immediately legible, knowable, and recognizable. Meditating on sound produced by (and on/in) mountains-with wonder-I offer a critical listening and imagining practice that accesses different temporalities, rethinks embodiment, and examines investments in walking as knowing. Moving with sound in this article, Black liberation and Indigenous resurgence (including Land Back) are experienced through geologic time, vibration, and soundwaves.
Propter Nos , 2019
On July 15 th 1914, the Silver Spray ferry was travelling across Lake Michigan from Chicago to Mi... more On July 15 th 1914, the Silver Spray ferry was travelling across Lake Michigan from Chicago to Milwaukee carrying 200 University of Chicago students when it ran aground on a 32-acre limestone formation. In 1914 and today, about 300 yards off of the shoreline, a 425-million-year-old limestone formation rises up from the lake's floor and kisses the surface of the water. The shoal, hard to detect particularly if the tide and water levels are above average, wrecked the Silver Spray. Even after shoals are mapped, they can often remain elusive due to the tide as well as their own capacity to shift and morph over time. By attending to what a shoal can do to a vessel moving toward it, I foreground the shoal as a conceptual and methodological disturbance.
This article reads Kay Lindsey's (1970) "The Black Woman as Woman," and Hortense Spillers' (1987)... more This article reads Kay Lindsey's (1970) "The Black Woman as Woman," and Hortense Spillers' (1987) "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe," as abolitionist responses to The Moynihan Report's pathologization of the Black family and it's naturalization of the family as the ordering episteme of social life. Lindsey's and Spillers' critique of the family exposes the violence that creates its conditions of possibility and paints a horizon where the family is beyond redemption. Refusing redemption, I gesture toward modes of Black life akin to Hartman's (1997) fugitives without genealogy and the character Precious from Sapphires's (1996) novel Push who create new Black relations.
This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that introduces vocabulary, analytic units, and... more This dissertation is an interdisciplinary project that introduces vocabulary, analytic units, and cultural landscapes that make it possible to conceive of slavery and settler colonialism as constitutive of one another. By focusing on Black female gender formation at the intersection of slavery and settler colonialism, this study argues that Black women's bodies function as sites where we can observe the power of slavery and settler colonialism simultaneously. Both the Slave Master's need for bodies and the Settler's need for space required the production of the Black female slave body as a unit of unending property. As a metonym for fungible property, the Black female slave body served as an apt metaphor for space within settler colonial imaginaries. Though largely omitted from the analytic frames of settler colonialism, Black women's bodies are materially and symbolically essential to the space making practices of settler colonialism in the U.S. and Canada.
Antipode, 2016
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This article tracks the production and circulation of post-intersectional discourse in
the neolib... more This article tracks the production and circulation of post-intersectional discourse in
the neoliberal university. Focusing specifically on the ways in which a public flagship
university from 2008 through 2013 produces anxious subjects (graduate students,
untenured professors, adjunct faculty, and staff), the article argues that neoliberal
logics and everyday speech acts within corporate universities temporalize, spatialize,
contain, and ultimately seek to render intersectionality to a time and space of the
“post.” It is within this neoliberal context of precarity that the article identifies and
scrutinizes Jasbir Puar’s critiques of intersectionality and post-intersectional discourse
as “anxious speech acts.” Finally, the article proposes a new and less anxious reading
practice inspired by Jennifer Nash’s “Black feminist love politics” that rethinks
intersectionality’s relationship to the subject and the neoliberal ethos of disposability.
Critical Sociology, 2010
This article examines activist Connie Burton's as well as other black women's 'political narrativ... more This article examines activist Connie Burton's as well as other black women's 'political narratives' of resistance to One Strike evictions. Contextualizing the One Strike policy within narratives of resistance to methods of discipline employed by public housing authorities will allow for an anchoring of this investigation of One Strike and no fault evictions in an analytical framework of governmentality. By focusing on disciplinary power in order to theorize state formations, the One Strike policy can be construed as a method of discipline that produces abject black female bodies and creates the 'structural effect' of a separate and bounded 'state space' from which black women should be excluded. This article will also demonstrate the ways in which the One Strike policy works to produce race, gender and space. This production of a social space that excludes black female bodies is predicated on legacies of racism and colonial dispossession.
Book Chapters by Tiffany Lethabo King
Duke University Press, 2019
Something about listening to this Anishinaabe woman's story, with its unfamiliar contours, brough... more Something about listening to this Anishinaabe woman's story, with its unfamiliar contours, brought into sharp relief the grooves, dips, depressions, and crevices that I had never paid attention to all of the times I had run my fingertips over the familiar skin of my own narrative of slavery. I thought I knew all of its dry patches, oil slicks, depressions, raised surfaces, grooved fault lines, and loosening jowls. I know the texture of that face. However, when I listened intently to her talk about how she and her people, the Anishinaabeg, and the other Indigenous peoples in this hemisphere have been stalked by the death shadow of genocide daily, then I began to know something new. As she spoke, I paid attention to the depth of the grooves, took the time to pursue the strange feeling of each rough cut that had been etched over time. A particular line between my eyebrows took on a new curve and depth. Running my finger over it, I found that I could poke clear through its threshold into new regions of "my slavery." On the face of my Blackness, I could feel a new clammy and terrorizing cavern whose depths swallowed the length of my finger.
“Racial Ecologies: Black Landscapes in Flux,” in Racial Ecologies. Eds. Leilani Nishime and Kim D. Hester Williams. University of Washington Press, 2018, pp. 65-75, 2018
Conferences by Tiffany Lethabo King
Symposium, March 30, 2018, 2018
With debates about how or whether climate change is “pure myth” in an age of alt-facts, this symp... more With debates about how or whether climate change is “pure myth” in an age of alt-facts, this symposium brings together scholars who think broadly and deeply about various forms of “toxicity” – social, sexual, economic, political, historically-situated, medical, as well as environmental – and the tales told about who and what is “toxic”, abnormal, diseased or harmful. Who represents “the folk” in Americana lore and in global narratives about progress? Where is the line between “traditionality” and “modernity,” who draws it, and what are its implications? How does “folk science” contribute to the making of current medical and agricultural innovations on a quickly heating planet? Drawing from Critical Race, Muslim, Indigenous, Queer and Environmental studies, this symposium’s storytellers will present on myriad “toxic tales” that span the intersections of folkloristics, queer theory, environmental and social justice, settler colonialism and structural racism in the United States and around the world.
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Papers by Tiffany Lethabo King
the neoliberal university. Focusing specifically on the ways in which a public flagship
university from 2008 through 2013 produces anxious subjects (graduate students,
untenured professors, adjunct faculty, and staff), the article argues that neoliberal
logics and everyday speech acts within corporate universities temporalize, spatialize,
contain, and ultimately seek to render intersectionality to a time and space of the
“post.” It is within this neoliberal context of precarity that the article identifies and
scrutinizes Jasbir Puar’s critiques of intersectionality and post-intersectional discourse
as “anxious speech acts.” Finally, the article proposes a new and less anxious reading
practice inspired by Jennifer Nash’s “Black feminist love politics” that rethinks
intersectionality’s relationship to the subject and the neoliberal ethos of disposability.
Book Chapters by Tiffany Lethabo King
Conferences by Tiffany Lethabo King
the neoliberal university. Focusing specifically on the ways in which a public flagship
university from 2008 through 2013 produces anxious subjects (graduate students,
untenured professors, adjunct faculty, and staff), the article argues that neoliberal
logics and everyday speech acts within corporate universities temporalize, spatialize,
contain, and ultimately seek to render intersectionality to a time and space of the
“post.” It is within this neoliberal context of precarity that the article identifies and
scrutinizes Jasbir Puar’s critiques of intersectionality and post-intersectional discourse
as “anxious speech acts.” Finally, the article proposes a new and less anxious reading
practice inspired by Jennifer Nash’s “Black feminist love politics” that rethinks
intersectionality’s relationship to the subject and the neoliberal ethos of disposability.