What Will We Be in this New Place: Black Enslaved Peoples in the Cherokee West

Eve Eure University of Pennsylvania Paper title: “What Will We Be in this New Place: Black Enslaved Peoples in the Cherokee West” This paper uses Tiffany Lethabo King’s theorization of Black fungibility as a... [ view full abstract ]

Eve Eure

University of Pennsylvania

Paper title: “What Will We Be in this New Place: Black Enslaved Peoples in the Cherokee West”

This paper uses Tiffany Lethabo King’s theorization of Black fungibility as a spatial analytic in order to read black enslaved bodies in the Cherokee Nation as symbols of transition, process, and potential. I argue that reading black enslaved bodies in this way illuminates how black enslaved people were imagined simultaneously as spatial potential and living on the fringe of Cherokee society. I turn to the stories of Cherokee forced removal from the South to the West in the 19^th century, and focus on black enslaved peoples that accompanied the Cherokee Nation as a means to re-read histories of removal and post-removal beyond labor and humanist forms of life. How might Blackness as space in the making pose a different set of questions related to territorial expansion, migration, and dispossession? If Blackness is imagined as space, could black enslaved bodies also symbolically and simultaneously represent a break or severing from place/homeland and hold open the possibility of a fragile future? I read the story of Cherokee leader Shoe boots and his relationship with his slave, Doll, and the families removal West within this spatial analytic not only to show the complexity of Black life, but also because the Shoe boots family story demonstrates the flux, process, and potential that is characteristic of the concept of fungibility. My paper draws from new scholarship in Black and Native Studies and work on Black fungibility initiated by Hortense Spillers and Saidiya Hartman, and attempts to think alongside their critical theorizations on slavery and subjection in order to write a different narrative of what it meant to be enslaved and claimed as kin in the Cherokee Nation for African-descended people.