This text calls for a disruption of metanarratives surrounding (ethnographic) place and the manners in which it is mapped out and understood. The text demands an exploration of what is beyond existing geographical landscapes. One such example she presents is Marie-Joseph Angelique's story in Canada. She connects Angelique’s story to geography, asserting that her alleged arson creates a terrain through which other black geographies are produced: the geographies of Montreal were produced in tandem with, rather than without, black captivity, labor, and subjectivity. Her story overturns the geographies of nation-purity to permit a different spatializing of Canada, showing how practices of domination both disrupt and enable black Canadian geographies through re-narration.
In terms of characterizing ethnographic places, and really space/place more generally, McKittrick’s work encourages us to think about the overlapping “physical, metaphorical, theoretical, and experiential contours” of a space. How do we think about places as three-dimensional? How do certain places overlap with “subjectivities, imaginations, and stories” (xiii)? When characterizing place, then, how do we navigate between the past, present, and possibly even the future? For me, McKittrick’s work with materiality and scale, especially in relation to the physicality of the auction block itself, has me wondering how we characterize a place in terms of physicality? How can bodies be incorporated into our characterization of place? How can we incorporate the immediacy and materiality of certain places?