A shoal slows a ship. Sailors could not see the sandbars beneath them and had to feel their way, and the formation itself drifts and reassembles, belonging neither to land nor to sea. King takes this as a method for reading between Black and Native studies.

She begins at 1441, when Portuguese ships rounded Cape Bojador and returned with captives and gold, rather than at 1492, in order to check the momentum that carries colonial, postcolonial and settler colonial studies toward familiar starting points. Her claim is that land and labour alone cannot account for conquest in this hemisphere, and that Blackness has mediated its relations throughout.

Working with Wynter, McKittrick, Brathwaite, Glissant and Pacific scholarship on seafaring and Indigenous mobility, she treats Black thought, movement and aesthetics as friction against the normal flow of Western theory, and looks for the shifting places where Black and Indigenous life have met.