Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle

In a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women’s geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition. Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs’s attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s philosophies. Central to McKittrick’s argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change. Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women’s studies at Queen’s University.

Politics & Social Sciences

McKittrick, Katherine

Social Sciences

Univ. of Minnesota Press

IIn a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women’s geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition. Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs’s attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s philosophies. Central to McKittrick’s argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change. Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women’s studies at Queen’s University.

Dear Science and Other Stories (Errantries)

In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Duke University Press Books

In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.

What is posthumanist subjectivity? Which institutions, historical events, and philosophies continue to define its cultural coordinates? And how can we move towards new Posthumanism(R)(TM) approaches which disinherit the cultural strictures from continental philosophy and western art practices that subliminally privilege a very specific conception of the Human as universal human? The reconfiguration of methodologies, approaches, and optics demanded by this new ontological turn situates art as the most productive multidisciplinary forum by which to address the truly universal challenges posed by the Anthropocene.\nPosthumanist discourses, and subsequently conceptions of the Anthropocene, have been substantially shaped by implicitly unacknowledged structural omissions. A foundation level endemic confusion of the specific with the universal critically compromises any anticipated radical paradigm shifts to, as philosopher Sylvia Wynter (2015) would have it, "give humanness a different future". Again, according to Wynter, it is important that we urgently shift the hollow universalizing terms that obscure the subjective positions of the "we" at the center of popular Anthropocene discourse. This reference point "is not the referent-we of the human species itself", a fungible planetary human figure, but rather a culturally discreet Human (or Human(R)(TM)) with specific anthropogenic activities and relations, both structurally and conceptually. 
Which new conceptions of the Anthropocene may arise when geographical time collapses with historical time? What new thoughts on the Anthropocene can be revealed when we acknowledge that neither the responsibility nor the vulnerability of climate change, are evenly/universally distributed? How do we disrupt the narratives of the Anthropocene(s) that erase the roles and realities of the non-Human(R)(TM)?

Antennae #57 Beyond Posthumanism

Arts & Photography

Antennaeproject

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McKittrick, Katherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by McKittrick, Katherine

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by McKittrick, Katherine. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle

Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle

Dear Science and Other Stories (Errantries)

Dear Science and Other Stories (Errantries)

Antennae #57 Beyond Posthumanism