Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle

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.

• In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
• Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture)
• Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness
• Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis
• Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
• Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human
• Black and Blur (consent not to be a single being)
• Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity
• Critique of Black Reason (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
• How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective