Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle by Katherine McKittrick

Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle Reviews

• 
  Harris

  A whole new framework for thinking about space and race. Earthshaking!
• 
  JC

  This was a beautifully written book that engages with the scholarship and literary work of bell hooks, Frantz Fanon, Dionne Brand, Stuart Hall, Sylvia Wynter, Marlene Nourbese Philip, Eduoard Glissant, and Octavia Butler. I think it’s less useful for me to recount the contents of this book, because I was perhaps most taken with the way it was written. I don’t think I’ve read about geography and the poetics of space before in this way. Gorgeous and simultaneously haunting.
  
  I loved the way McKittrick explains her use of demonic, both in the religious and spiritual sense but also in the sense it was used my scientists and philosophers (e.g. Laplace’s demon and Maxwell’s demon) which speaks not only to something about as eschatological as thermodynamics but also to the tensions between structure and agency:
  
  “Etymologically, demonic is defined as spirits—most likely the devil, demons, or deities—capable of possessing a human being. It is attributed to the human or the object through which the spirit makes itself known, rather than the demon itself, thus identifying unusual, frenzied, fierce, cruel human behaviors. While demons, devils, and deities, and the behavioral energies they pass on to others, are unquestionably wrapped up in religious hierarchies and the supernatural, the demonic has also been understood in terms that are less ecclesiastical. In mathematics, physics, and computer science, the demonic connotes a working system that cannot have a determined, or knowable, outcome. The demonic, then, is a non-deterministic schema; it is a process that is hinged on uncertainty and non-linearity because the organizing principle cannot predict the future. This schema, this way of producing or desiring an outcome, calls into question “the always non-arbitrary pre-prescribed” parameters of sequential and classificatory linearity.”
  
  Quite a bit of this book was focused on ‘Canada’ and the way Black history has been erased from spatial conceptions of its land and geographical study more broadly:
  
  “In recently researching slavery in Upper Canada/Ontario, I was told by a local archivist that slavery did not occur in this particular province and that blacks did not reside in the city of York (now Toronto) until the 1950s. While his assertion conflicted with some of the general histories of urban Canada, this contradiction—I am familiar with a very different, specifically black, urban history—I was simultaneously surprised and unsurprised…
  
  This time, however, the surprise led me right into wonder, right into the historically present landscape of York/Toronto, to think about how projects of black “recovery” are not simply hindered by the denial of archivists, but actually structured by what might be called new histories or new genealogies…
  
  So, what happens when we “wake up,” to borrow Wynter’s terminology, and find that Canada, and blackness, are no longer what we thought they were? What do we wonder? That is, my surprise and my “unsurprise”— the correlated embedded histories, the anticipated and unexpected denials, and my experiential responses to them—made me wonder how “conceptual otherness” is not simply missing or misread, but rather underwritten by new forms of knowledge that make Canada/York/Toronto what it is. Wonder invites new avenues for exploration that are both unexpected and underacknowledged and call into question the contexts that produce surprise and wonder in the first place: what makes blackness so surprising in Canada? And, what is curious about this surprise? To examine black Canada and Marie-Joseph Angélique as surprises alone takes away from the possibilities implicit in the unfamiliar; black surprise, alone, undermines an examination of what was considered impossible under the paradigm of white Canada. ”
  
  McKittrick cites Dionne Brand a lot in this book, once citing the way she called Bathurst and Bloor “the only oasis of Blacks in the miles and miles to be learned of in the white desert that was a city.” McKittrick characterized this “description of Toronto, Ontario, as a ‘white desert’ (biocentrically black-habitable, what Wynter might call a ‘torrid zone,’“ as an assertion that “places blackness right in the middle of the black-uninhabitable (Canada)…”
  
  Similarly, I think this other passage by Brand that McKittrick includes is very relevant because it demonstrates how this erasure occurs in the sorts of presumptions that people make, like the person Brand was trying to get employment from:
  
  “It was that tiny office in the back of a building on Keele Street. I had called the morning before, looking for a job, and the man answering remarked on that strong Scottish name of my putative father and told me to come right in and the job would be mine. Yes, it was that tiny office in the back of a building on Keele when I was turning eighteen, and I dressed up in my best suit outfit with high heels and lipstick and ninety-seven pounds of trying hard desperate feminine heterosexuality, wanting to look like the man on the phone’s imagination so I could get the job. When I went to the tiny office and saw the smile of the man on the phone fade and disappear because all of a sudden it needed experience or was just given to somebody else . . . Yes, it was that man on the phone, that office on Keele Street, the man’s imagination for a Scottish girl he could molest as she filed papers in the tiny office, it was that wanting to cry in my best suit and high heels I could barely walk in and the lipstick my sister helped me to put on straight and plucked my eyebrows and made me wear foundation cream in order, I suppose, to dull the impact of my blackness so that man in the tiny office would give me that job. . . . That I could ever think of getting such a job, even so small and mean a job, that some white man could forget himself and at least see me as someone he could exploit . . . My sister worked in the kitchens of hospitals and that is where I did find a job the next week, and that is where we waited out the ebb and flow of favour and need in this white place.”
  
  One last Brand excerpt that I was very interested in:
  
  “I have not visited the Door of No Return . . . I am constructing a map of the region . . . The Door of No Return is of course no place at all but a metaphor for place . . . it is not one place but a collection of places. Land- falls in Africa, where a castle was built, a house for slaves, une maison des esclaves . . . a place where a certain set of transactions occurred, perhaps the most important of them being the transaction of selves . . . The door signifies the historical moment which colours all moments of the diaspora . . . A body pushing a grocery cart through the city housing at Lawrence and Bathurst in Toronto, her laundry, her shopping all contained there . . .”
  
  I think this book really got me interested in Brand, who I will have to read soon. McKittrick spends quite a few pages working through the geography of slave ships and this is something I’d like to return to in the future. Most lumber used to construct slave ships would have passed through sawmills, and I think it’s worth contemplating how particular technological artifacts like watermills were crucial elements in larger assemblages that were involved in such terrible human subjugation.
  
  bell hooks is discussed quite extensively in this book, principally her theorizing on margins, which McKittrick draws from when discussing the spatialization of positionality and power. The critique I encountered of hooks (via Patricia Hill Collins) was this:
  
  “The margin hems in bell hooks; her claim to this space is radically disconnected from the new worlds she intends to imagine and create. Her body is a margin, which is an empty metaphor for “difference.” ...This critique is not meant to discredit hooks or the margin but rather to notice the geo- graphic processes that are taking place underneath and throughout black feminist politics and feminism in general. That is, regardless of what we think of hooks’s margin and her politics, these issues are also spatial issues with telling spatial consequences.“
  
  I feel like I’m the sort of person that McKittrick would be critiquing here. I’ve often subscribed to notions of core and periphery that Marxists like Samir Amin deployed, and McKittrick places those theoretical commitments in the same space as hooksian geopolitics. The slave auction block and the plantation are two spaces that McKittrick turns to resist against this peripheralization and invisibalization of Black existence. Instead she works to show how deeply Black subjects and their bodies existed within and not simply peripheral to the spaces that geography studies, and hence why they must be central and not peripheral to any geographical study of so-called ‘Canada’ or the ‘U.S.’.
• 
  Elizabeth

  "Black women’s geographies and poetics challenge us to stay human by invoking how black spaces and places are integral to our planetary and local geographic stories and how the question of seeable human differences puts spatial and philosophical demands on geography. These demands site the struggle between black women’s geographies and geographic domination, suggesting that more humanly workable geographies are continually being lived, expressed, and imagined."
• 
  Tatiana (Tots) Height

  I would not recommend. This book uses unnecessarily academic language that is hard to follow. I wouldn’t recommend this reading to a layperson. I also wouldn’t recommend it to any academic who likes readable verbiage. The only reason I was able to grasp any of the points McKittrick was trying to make is because she made references to so many other books or authors that I’ve read.
• 
  Weckea

  Once you're in the groove, it becomes a remarkable piece of literature for learning (and re-learning) about the difficult spaces (and places) of black women's lives, histories, and geographies. As well, it points you in new directions for continued reading and research. Good stuff!!!!!!!
• 
  israology

  4.50 💫
  
  Big Brained energy necessary here.
• 
  amyleigh

  This book offers a radical shift in how we think about geography and Black women and does so with a forceful but careful poetics and citational practice. McKittrick's texts - from Kindred to Marie-Joseph Angelique, from Glissant to Spillers - are vast and her offerings are abundant. McKittrick's Black feminist cartographic practice of imagining space otherwise is also helpful in that it engages with Black Canadian presences, tugging at Canada's own mapping of its history and engaging this history with more thoroughly and visibly theorized Black American experiences. I will return here many times.
• 
  Ally Perrin

  “as geographical contests over discourses of ownership. Ownership of the body, individual and community voices, bus seats, womxn, Africa, feminism, history, homes, record labels, money, cars -- these are recurring positionalities written and articulated through protest, musics, feminist theory, fiction, the everyday.”
• 
  Mike

  Beautifully written, engaging. Provides both a critique of and opportunity for efforts within the discipline of Geography to confront its racist roots.
• 
  Kim

  Absolutely amazing read.
• 
  Flora

  Inspired, necessary, dense reading and the thoughts set the stage for creative response to fill the void.
• 
  Linh

  3.5/5 Brilliant. If only it was a little easier to understand. But that's probably on me...
• 
  Java

  This is a great book.Chapter 2 is my favorite.
• 
  Aida

  A deep, crucial read. So much in here, with excellent chapters to share with students.
• 
  Miguel

  Katherine McKittrick does monumental work in this text. Shattering the binary notions of marginalization and subversion and supplanting them with textured geographic inquiry, McKittrick moves deftly through material, epochs, and mediums to interrogate society's notions of transparent space and argues for geography, space, and place as socially constituted. McKittrick sells herself extremely short when claiming to not make the same contributions to metaphysics as Sylvia Wynter, who McKittrick frequently cites. McKittrick is at her best when breezily explicating the notoriously difficult Wynter material in furtherance of her argument. McKittrick is a scholar of a class all her own, and while following in the tradition of many black feminist thinkers, establishes a paradigm that moves Wynter's thinking (slightly) in a new direction.
• 
  Hollis

  This is a really insightful analysis of race, gender, and geographic scale! I questioned her positioning of normative geography as a perspective that regards the land/natural space as stable/unchanging, but that wasn't enough of an issue to seriously hinder my appreciation for her theoretical insights. You'll get productive readings of slave narratives as well as sound engagements with Black feminist theorizing here. In particular, chapter 4's focus on Black Canada will still with me. In it, McKittrick problematizes Canada's reputation as a space for freedom divorced from the racial politics occurring 'over there' in the United States.
• 
  Matt Sautman

  Demonic Grounds places geography into a context that enables its deconstruction at the same time as complicating its functions. Propelled largely by the philosophy of Slyvia Wynters, Demonic Grounds focuses largely upon the relation human bodies have with their respective geographies. More specifically, it is concerned with black female bodies and how they are garroted, removed, or otherwise oppressed. It is a book as significant for one interested in Black Feminist Theory as it is for the geographical minded reader.
• 
  Melissa

  2.5 * Good/important contribution to the field, but aggravatingly opaque writing at times.
• 
  Annie

  paradigmatic!