SoiferI VtP Annotation: Demonic Grounds

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.