What do you think?
Rate this book
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.
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.
190 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2006
68 people are currently reading
1486 people want to read
About the author
Katherine McKittrick
14 books131 followersKatherine McKittrick is a professor in Gender Studies at Queen’s University. She is an academic and writer whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, with an emphasis on the ways in which social justice emerges in black creative texts (music, fiction, poetry, visual art). While many scholars have researched the areas of North American, European, Caribbean, and African black geographies, McKittrick was the first scholar to put forth the interdisciplinary possibilities of black and black feminist geography, with an emphasis on embodied, creative and intellectual spaces engendered in the diaspora.
McKittrick has a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from York University; she received her degree in 2004.
Since 2005, she has been Professor in Gender Studies at Queen’s University, with joint appointments in Cultural Studies and Geography. She is currently Editor at Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography.
McKittrick’s work has focused on black feminist thought and cultural geography, as explored in her book Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006). The book has been reviewed in Gender, Place & Culture, Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Religion, & Literature, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies and American Literature. The book was followed by Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (2007), which she co-edited with Clyde Woods. The book has been reviewed in Canadian Woman Studies.
McKittrick’s research draws on the areas of black studies, anti-colonial studies, cultural geographies, and gender studies, and attends to the links between epistemological narratives and social justice. Creative texts she analyzed include music, music making, poetry, visual art, and literature, while specifically looking at the works of Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Robbie McCauley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Willie Bester, Nas, Octavia Butler, and Dionne Brand.
(from Wikipedia)
McKittrick has a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from York University; she received her degree in 2004.
Since 2005, she has been Professor in Gender Studies at Queen’s University, with joint appointments in Cultural Studies and Geography. She is currently Editor at Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography.
McKittrick’s work has focused on black feminist thought and cultural geography, as explored in her book Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006). The book has been reviewed in Gender, Place & Culture, Southscapes: Geographies of Race, Religion, & Literature, Topia: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies and American Literature. The book was followed by Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (2007), which she co-edited with Clyde Woods. The book has been reviewed in Canadian Woman Studies.
McKittrick’s research draws on the areas of black studies, anti-colonial studies, cultural geographies, and gender studies, and attends to the links between epistemological narratives and social justice. Creative texts she analyzed include music, music making, poetry, visual art, and literature, while specifically looking at the works of Sylvia Wynter, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Robbie McCauley, M. NourbeSe Philip, Willie Bester, Nas, Octavia Butler, and Dionne Brand.
(from Wikipedia)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews
Read
August 7, 2020A whole new framework for thinking about space and race. Earthshaking!
October 17, 2023
McKittrick’s “Demonic Grounds" is an indispensable and challenging geographic text. Drawing Black Studies and Geography into dialogue, McKittrick shows how deep engagement with the situated geographic knowledges of the subaltern offers promising pathes forward for the discipline.
June 24, 2024
Recentring the emotive dimensions of space, McKittrick proposes a geographic framework which foregrounds relationality. Taking the example of Equiano’s slave narrative, she stresses that the ship is not simply a stage, but a technology whose movement reshapes the geographies it moves through. Vitally, in mapping the hardships through this unique space, Equiano gives new meaning to the vessel. Indeed, she suggests, “naming place is also an act of naming the self and self-histories.”
Similarly, foregrounding the lived reality of the ‘color-line’, McKittrick suggests that Du Bois depicts a geographic genealogy in which spatiality and knowledge intersect. The “big house” may be physically separated but, built upon a “groan,” also connected to the labour that produced it.
Similarly, foregrounding the lived reality of the ‘color-line’, McKittrick suggests that Du Bois depicts a geographic genealogy in which spatiality and knowledge intersect. The “big house” may be physically separated but, built upon a “groan,” also connected to the labour that produced it.
April 3, 2024
Re-read because I lost my notes from the first time.
December 30, 2021
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.’.
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.’.
December 27, 2021
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.
August 6, 2022
4.50 💫
Big Brained energy necessary here.
Big Brained energy necessary here.
March 27, 2023
"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" (Introduction, xxiv)
Obsessed with McKittrick's book, which asks the question: how do geography and Blackness work together to advance a different way of knowing and imagining the world? (xxvi) This is peak interdisciplinary scholarship, and essential reading in an age where connections and relations are increasingly foregrounded; perhaps I have been looking in the wrong places for too long: maybe the multispecies assemblages and relations of trans-human kinship can wait, and it is the intersections and connections between human geography, Black feminism and Black studies (xxxi) that are overlooked but the most essential in our age of racialised capitalism. Articulates, in a very material way, what Black geography can look like.
Also, as someone writing a paper on Kindred, I was thrilled by the first chapter. Do not have the time to read this cover to cover, but I'll try to return to it.
Obsessed with McKittrick's book, which asks the question: how do geography and Blackness work together to advance a different way of knowing and imagining the world? (xxvi) This is peak interdisciplinary scholarship, and essential reading in an age where connections and relations are increasingly foregrounded; perhaps I have been looking in the wrong places for too long: maybe the multispecies assemblages and relations of trans-human kinship can wait, and it is the intersections and connections between human geography, Black feminism and Black studies (xxxi) that are overlooked but the most essential in our age of racialised capitalism. Articulates, in a very material way, what Black geography can look like.
Also, as someone writing a paper on Kindred, I was thrilled by the first chapter. Do not have the time to read this cover to cover, but I'll try to return to it.
Read
October 6, 2021"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."
February 20, 2025
o sigui aquesta tia………….. increible es una passada: lectura obligatoria de la vida noies
i a mes flipo perque no crec q fos la seva intencio però ha fet mes per revalorar l’espacialitat que el mateix soja. o sigui QUINA TIA!!!!!!
increible increible estic aprenent moltissim!!!!! l’haure de rellegir però, per assumir ben be tot el que explica
i a mes flipo perque no crec q fos la seva intencio però ha fet mes per revalorar l’espacialitat que el mateix soja. o sigui QUINA TIA!!!!!!
increible increible estic aprenent moltissim!!!!! l’haure de rellegir però, per assumir ben be tot el que explica
October 6, 2024
Following the approach of Xine Yao, I have been reading the work of Afro-American and Caribbean thinkers, constructing a framework of the experience of diaspora. Once I'd read Édouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, it was hard to appreciate other works because his feels so new, so outside of Eurocentric norms, full of love. Aesthetics have meaning, a rejection of control; constructed beauty transgressing violence.
Katherine McKittrick builds on his work, and that of Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde. She takes Poetics and constructs a spacial geography of Black Women in America. We go beyond the Caribbean, Glissant's anchors, fires and ebbing tides - entering new spaces. A framework meaningfully applied.
'The Caribbean is the Other America, concealment, roads do not penetrate, mahogany trees, blue beaches, the salt of the sea, our landscape's our monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside.' The slave ship, the seller's block... also the subterranean office, the creepy boss fantasising over a white girl filing for him in its tight recesses, only to reject the Scottish named black woman who arrives...
Bell Hooks' safe spaces, churches, and community organisations. Off-stage sites of resistance. To construct histories of non-hegemonic groups, we go inside. Challenging charts, grids and geographies of domination: Man, purveyor of universal généralisant: unquestioned reason and authority. Incorporated oppression.
The Fanonian self hemmed in, stays in place. Glissant and McKittrick go beyond: 'Geography is human, that humanness is geographic - blood, bones, hands, lips, wrists, your land, your planet, your road, your sea, its all speakable.' I think this is so lovely - constellations at our finger tips :)
It's one of those books I would love to have explained to me - I do agree with the review noting that Big brained energy is needed here. >:)
Katherine McKittrick builds on his work, and that of Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde. She takes Poetics and constructs a spacial geography of Black Women in America. We go beyond the Caribbean, Glissant's anchors, fires and ebbing tides - entering new spaces. A framework meaningfully applied.
'The Caribbean is the Other America, concealment, roads do not penetrate, mahogany trees, blue beaches, the salt of the sea, our landscape's our monument: its meaning can only be traced on the underside.' The slave ship, the seller's block... also the subterranean office, the creepy boss fantasising over a white girl filing for him in its tight recesses, only to reject the Scottish named black woman who arrives...
Bell Hooks' safe spaces, churches, and community organisations. Off-stage sites of resistance. To construct histories of non-hegemonic groups, we go inside. Challenging charts, grids and geographies of domination: Man, purveyor of universal généralisant: unquestioned reason and authority. Incorporated oppression.
The Fanonian self hemmed in, stays in place. Glissant and McKittrick go beyond: 'Geography is human, that humanness is geographic - blood, bones, hands, lips, wrists, your land, your planet, your road, your sea, its all speakable.' I think this is so lovely - constellations at our finger tips :)
It's one of those books I would love to have explained to me - I do agree with the review noting that Big brained energy is needed here. >:)
September 18, 2023
2017- This book explores and redifines geography. It looks at the ways in which gender, race and site coincide shaping black women´s subjectivity. It is a complicated exploration, but it hasgreat insights.
2023- It took a second read to understand the magnitude of McKittrick's book and contribution to African American studies!
2023- It took a second read to understand the magnitude of McKittrick's book and contribution to African American studies!
August 17, 2017
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!!!!!!!
September 26, 2024
I strongly agree with another reviewer below: BIG BRAINED ENERGY is needed here. Admittedly this was a tough read, even for a graduate geography seminar... but it's a rewarding one. I have no background in Black Feminist Geographies, and this was a good introduction and immediate deep dive into the topic.
McKittrick's thesis is that concealment, marginalization, and boundaries are important social processes. Space is socially constructed - through domination. We (society) make concealment happen. However, the geographic domination/ project is not finished and is not immovable. These constructions are mutable. This links to her hopeful idea and proposition of black females' marginality as providing a ‘workable geography’, and inherently is a possibility for change.
Spatializing differences -- I've never heard of this before, however, this is a great conceptual handle to consider how social hierarchies are reproduced in the landscape and then naturalized/accepted, via the cooperation of economic, ideological, social, and political processes. Spatializing differences is about placing the world in an uneven ideological order, theorizing where nondominant groups (in this case black bodies) should “naturally” belong, and where they should be excluded from. She has a great chapter on Black Canada, undercutting popular imaginations of Canada as liberal, white, born from two nations (Britain + France), and nonblack (popular conceptions are that blacks are very recent 1950s migrants).
The project of black geography and her book is to reclaim sites of terror (e.g. the attic, the auction block) into sites of black possession and struggle. Overall, I read and finished the book with gratitude for the argument it has presented so convingly -- that black geography deconstructs geography from being secure and unwavering, and has something important and alternative to contribute to efforts to produce new, just, equitable spaces and meanings.
McKittrick's thesis is that concealment, marginalization, and boundaries are important social processes. Space is socially constructed - through domination. We (society) make concealment happen. However, the geographic domination/ project is not finished and is not immovable. These constructions are mutable. This links to her hopeful idea and proposition of black females' marginality as providing a ‘workable geography’, and inherently is a possibility for change.
Spatializing differences -- I've never heard of this before, however, this is a great conceptual handle to consider how social hierarchies are reproduced in the landscape and then naturalized/accepted, via the cooperation of economic, ideological, social, and political processes. Spatializing differences is about placing the world in an uneven ideological order, theorizing where nondominant groups (in this case black bodies) should “naturally” belong, and where they should be excluded from. She has a great chapter on Black Canada, undercutting popular imaginations of Canada as liberal, white, born from two nations (Britain + France), and nonblack (popular conceptions are that blacks are very recent 1950s migrants).
The project of black geography and her book is to reclaim sites of terror (e.g. the attic, the auction block) into sites of black possession and struggle. Overall, I read and finished the book with gratitude for the argument it has presented so convingly -- that black geography deconstructs geography from being secure and unwavering, and has something important and alternative to contribute to efforts to produce new, just, equitable spaces and meanings.
December 16, 2022
Interesting at times with its treatise on the analytical promise of centering Black women in Black Geographies, Demonic Grounds offers a subtle yet useful paradigm shift. At the same time, much of the text was repetitive and intellectually flashy which obscured its impact and made it harder to follow.
But what is probably most concerning is that while McKittrick wants to center Black women, there is no foregrounded discussion on Black women as an analytical category. While one could argue that it is in their relationality to space that 'creates' them and disrupts the geography around them in order to be (il)legible, it does not diminish their wayward state of being in the text. Moreover, it even opens the door for essentialist interpretations of Black femininity such as in her discussion on the "space between the legs" and the 'necessity' of the womb/reproduction to conceive of colonial power and its ruptures. To that end, I'm hesitant about what Demonic Grounds can actually say about the ruptures triggered by other experiences such as Black transness.
But what is probably most concerning is that while McKittrick wants to center Black women, there is no foregrounded discussion on Black women as an analytical category. While one could argue that it is in their relationality to space that 'creates' them and disrupts the geography around them in order to be (il)legible, it does not diminish their wayward state of being in the text. Moreover, it even opens the door for essentialist interpretations of Black femininity such as in her discussion on the "space between the legs" and the 'necessity' of the womb/reproduction to conceive of colonial power and its ruptures. To that end, I'm hesitant about what Demonic Grounds can actually say about the ruptures triggered by other experiences such as Black transness.
October 21, 2024
this book needs to be talked about more!! it can be used in so many different contexts bc it's such a clear elucidation about how we embody place and space, and about how geographies (ways of conceptualizing, dominating, interpreting relationships) are socially constructed. "black geographies" = key terminological intervention, which names how black subjectivity is construed as being in a marginal position w/ respect to white heteropatriarchy, and thus black geographies are sites of struggle that provide generative opportunities to understand space in new ways. also works w/ glissant's theory of "poetics of landscape" to frame her conversations around discursive formations of place/space in the form of retellings of historical events and cultural expressions (literature, music esp). it definitely anticipates current conversations around race-animality and sets the groundwork for some musicological work about how BIPOC folks use sound to build alternate forms of community and articulate subjectivities. wow so cool.
May 5, 2021
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.
July 9, 2024
incredible. the perfect length. stuff on Canada and Sylvia Winter at the end is probably the best stuff. McKittrick's mode of analysis simultaneously operates on eighteen scales and seems effortless. her writing is truly life producing and manages to make the same point over and over again without being repetitive. in the hands of a lesser writer, her points could come off a little BS'y but she does it so well. really just pretty fun to read.
April 6, 2021
“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.”
October 16, 2025
Loooove Katherine McKittrick’s take on space and Blackness. The book centers on Black women’s experiences and theories and it’s a must read for anyone who studies history, art, geography, architecture, literature etc (really any humanities field).
February 12, 2018
Beautifully written, engaging. Provides both a critique of and opportunity for efforts within the discipline of Geography to confront its racist roots.
April 23, 2020
Absolutely amazing read.
March 15, 2021
3.5/5 Brilliant. If only it was a little easier to understand. But that's probably on me...
July 10, 2022
Really compelling exploration of the production of Black female space.
September 2, 2022
This is a great book.Chapter 2 is my favorite.
September 20, 2022
A deep, crucial read. So much in here, with excellent chapters to share with students.
February 24, 2024
Loved it. Just as fascinating as Dear Science, but it feels slightly less like essential reading if you have already read that.
May 22, 2025
Good, long read.
August 30, 2025
Very interesting perspective
September 16, 2025
So interesting
Displaying 1 - 30 of 37 reviews