Meeting on the Shoals

This essay by Joey Mauro explores the aesthetic practices of survivance in Indigenous and Black cultural production through the lenses of Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance and Tiffany Lethabo King’s notion of the shoal. By analyzing Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen and David Chariandy’s Soucouyant, the essay examines how these novels perform survivance by engaging Cree and Trinidadian knowledge systems that resist the representational mechanisms of Western humanism. The analysis focuses on how these texts activate more-than-humanist ways of knowing—i.e., Cree cosmologies in Kiss of the Fur Queen and Trinidadian mythology in Soucouyant—that disrupt colonial epistemologies and create spaces for alternate socialities. Rather than grounding relation in commensurable politics, the essay locates possibilities for solidarity in uncommonality: in the performed survivance of alternative ways of knowing and being that exceed the violent schema through which the settler state makes “the human” legible. The shoal, a provisional and fluid meeting place for distinct but converging Indigenous and Black epistemologies, serves as a metaphor for the generative potential of these texts, where difference is preserved without domination.