What evidence or examples support the main argument, narrative or e/affect?

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Isabelle Soifer's picture
January 23, 2020
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One crucial example McKittrick presents is when she traces Sylvia Wynter’s argument regarding the invention of Man, asserting that present orders of existence center on discourses of normalcy. It is the development and mapping of the uninhabitable and uneven archipelagos that reveal important ways in which Man’s geographies are overrepresented. Whereas Man1 dehumanized and disembodied subaltern populations by conflating their beingness with terra nullius, Man2 sought to guarantee in its middle-class model a foundation for a “normal being” and what needed to come under racial-sexual regulation. She argues that examining Man’s geographies reveals the limitations of existing geographic arrangements. Demonic grounds, on the other hand, put forth a geographic grammar that locates the complex position and potentiality of black women’s sense of place. She introduces music as a geographic act through which blackness can be read as a meaningful part of the landscape. She asserts that black women’s geographies challenge the “just is” of traditional geography, indicating an alterability of “the ground beneath our feet.” She claims that local-contextual experiences might be read beyond the margins, as part of an interhuman story that unhinges the body-self and expresses new forms of life that contest historically present, uneven, genres of human geography. Black women’s geographies and poetics challenge us to “stay human,” invoking how black spaces/places are integral to multiscalar geographic stories and how the question of seeable human differences put spatial and philosophical demands on geography.

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Kaitlyn Rabach's picture
January 19, 2020
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Here’s a list of terms and themes I think McKittrick works with throughout the book:

Transparent space vs. opaque space (contesting space as just “is”)

Three-dimensionality of space

Materiality and its scales

Racial-sexual displacement

Diaspora across space and time

Ungeographic bodies and geographic domination 

How does difference become naturalized? Showing, making visible that process 

The demonic … demonic grounds

Deep space (Smith)

Poetics of landscape (Glissant)

The color-line (DeBois)

New ethnicities, the essential black subjectivity (Hall)

Site of memory (Morrison)

Black absented presence

Re-placing 

 

In order to really work with and address these concepts and themes, McKittrick weaves together several different genres and analytics. She theorizes slave auction blocks, maps of old plantations, the space of Harriet Jacobs attic, and engages with Sylvia Winter’s work.

 

 

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