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McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), $22.50, 240 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8166-4702-6 (paper).
In Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006), Katherine McKittrick begins with two basic premises: (1) that geography is infused with sensations and distinct ways of knowing and (2) that humanness is always geographic. While this claim is not especially novel, McKittrick's sustained exploration and analysis of Black women's geographies is altogether revolutionary. In Demonic Grounds, geography is not confined to the material world. Instead, geography encompasses the full range of Black women's knowledge and experiences that have been concealed through histories of geographic domination. The author defines this domination primarily as the enslavement and racial-sexual displacement of Black bodies and subjectivities throughout the African diaspora. Her story begins with the slave castles off the Ivory Coast, then into the slave ships of the Middle Passage, journeying across the United States and Canada through the Underground Railroad, and ends up in a small northern California apartment in 1976. Through her vivid storytelling, McKittrick invites us into the "deep space" of Black female subjectivity. She creates an evocative conceptual arena that we can use to interpret fuller and nuanced intricacies of Black women's agency.
In basic terms, McKittrick's exploration of Black women's geographies takes place through literary analyses of essential readings in North American Black feminist fiction, which include Octavia Butler's Kindred, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. However, the theoretical framework that she uses to analyze the texts is entirely un-North American. Drawing from the dynamic and almost ecclesiastical writings of Affo-Caribbean writers Sylvia Wynters and Marlene Nourbese Phillips, McKittrick transports us into the dark, moist "in between places" of Black women's lives. She urges us into places and experiences of Black womanhood that have been exploited, denied, and often unrepresentable as result of physical, psychic, and epistemic violence. For McKittrick, the horrors of rape, containment, and commodification make up the real, remembered, and (re)imagined personhoods of Black women that have materialized within the global landscapes of White supremacy in the last four centuries.
McKittrick approaches Black women's geography through an (anti)epistemological framework that she calls "the demonic." She describes...