King builds a method out of a geological term. A shoal is neither sea nor shore but a shifting shallow that forces a ship to slow, and she uses it to bring Black diaspora studies and Native studies into contact without dissolving either into the other. The figure lets her refuse the shorthand in which Blackness is imagined through water and rootlessness while Indigeneity is imagined through land and rootedness. Beginning with 1441 and Portuguese voyages down the West African coast rather than with 1492, she resets the chronology of conquest so that the slave trade and settler colonialism can be read as one process. Chapters move through colonial mapping, the edges of the plantation, Black and Native erotics, and a ceremony for Shakespeare's Sycorax, drawing on visual art, film and poetry alongside theory. Slavery and genocide, on her account, jointly produced the category of the human that both fields still contest.