New World Grammars: The ‘Unthought’ Black Discourses of Conquest

This article inquires whether or not North American white settler colonial studies’ preoccupation with settlement, settler subjectivity and land make it increasingly difficult to register the far reaching and ongoing violence of conquest in everyday life? I argue that an analytical return to and tarrying with conquest enables a different kind of conversation and ethical engagement among scholars in Black Studies, Native Studies, ethnic studies, settler colonial studies, and other critical discourses. Specifically, I am compelled to pursue a different problematic: “how has Black Studies has been talking about genocide, colonization, settlement and slavery?”