McKittrick powerfully critiques traditional (white, patriarchal) and naturalized geographic knowledge, building off Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic to site/cite a different sense of place for black identities: as part, but not completely, of material and imaginative configurations of geography. Equipped with Sylvia Wynter’s notion of “demonic grounds,” she asserts black women’s historical-contextual locations within geographic organizations. Using an interdisciplinary approach, McKittrick does not seek to “discover” black women on the margins, but to address the unrepresentability of black femininity and ways black women contribute to a re-presentation of human geography. Poetics of landscape lends a critique the boundaries of transatlantic slavery, rewrites national narratives, respatializes feminism, and develops new pathways across traditional geographic arrangements, reconceptualizing space/place to discover more humanely workable geographies. Examining the interplay between geographies of domination and black women’s geographies in Canada, the U.S., and the Caribbean, she critiques the spatial project of domination that organizes social difference, implicating black subjects through crude racial-sexual hierarchies. To contend with unjust categorizations, she pushes for ethical human-geographic formulations that subaltern communities advance via a grammar of liberation.
In Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Katherine McKittrick navigates between the past, present, (possibly future?), archives, fiction, and material and real lives to explore the spaces and places of black women throughout history, specifically during around the time of the transatlantic slave trade. At its core, this book questions the geographic implications of various sites like slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacob’s attic, and more. For McKittrick, space is alterable, amendable, in constant flux. Space is not viewed from a single vantage point. Looking from multiple vantage points, then, becomes one of the main themes in McKittrick’s text. McKittrick argues geography is not “secure and unwavering,” but produced through social processes of concealment, marginalization, and boundaries (xi).
For me, Chapter 3 (The Authenticity of This Story Has Not Been Documented: Auction Blocks) is the most creative due to its scaling from raw materiality to larger discursive and structural formations. It begins with a discussion of the literal slave auction block. The space in its raw form. After McKittrick establishes the materiality of the block and how it was used as a site of objectification and commoditization of black bodies, she then explores the concept of scaling: how does this singular site of the auction block extend beyond this confined space? For McKittrick this site can be scaled to include the racial and gendered meanings of the plantation, the region more generally, and finally, this site can extend to the scale of the global slave economy/trade itself. The space of this singular site is mapped with not only these various scales, but ALSO, and perhaps most importantly, with the black women’s’ contestations and resistance. This resistance, too, can extend beyond our linear aspects of time. Scaling of space allows for a conceptualization that goes both beyond the body and beyond time. After reading this book, we see how the body can go beyond space itself too.