Reviews

Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle by Katherine McKittrick

alannathelioness's review against another edition

challenging dark emotional informative slow-paced

5.0

jenna0010's review

5.0

This book offers a radical shift in how we think about geography and Black women and does so with a forceful but careful poetics and citational practice. McKittrick's texts - from Kindred to Marie-Joseph Angelique, from Glissant to Spillers - are vast and her offerings are abundant. McKittrick's Black feminist cartographic practice of imagining space otherwise is also helpful in that it engages with Black Canadian presences, tugging at Canada's own mapping of its history and engaging this history with more thoroughly and visibly theorized Black American experiences. I will return here many times.

mmcloe's review

adventurous challenging hopeful informative reflective medium-paced

An incredibly invaluable and helpful toolkit for thinking through the role of space and place when talking about identity. I'm particularly struck by McKittrick's use of the "garret" as a critique/expansion of the idea of marginalization when talking about Black women. I've always been a little hesitant when referring to people or groups as "marginalized" but was never quite able to put my finger onto the reason why. McKittrick's analysis of how the "margins" aren't quite as far away as we think they are restructured the way I think about power and oppression. 

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Content Warnings

Graphic: Slavery, Racism, and Sexism

elizabethchant's review against another edition

challenging informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

maddieshort00's review against another edition

Honestly I had to read this full text in less than a week for a history class and I didn’t make it through the last chapter. It’s a really fascinating analysis and I plan to finish it eventually, but it deserves much more time than I was able to put in to it.

annieblloyd's review against another edition

5.0

paradigmatic!

miguel's review against another edition

5.0

Katherine McKittrick does monumental work in this text. Shattering the binary notions of marginalization and subversion and supplanting them with textured geographic inquiry, McKittrick moves deftly through material, epochs, and mediums to interrogate society's notions of transparent space and argues for geography, space, and place as socially constituted. McKittrick sells herself extremely short when claiming to not make the same contributions to metaphysics as Sylvia Wynter, who McKittrick frequently cites. McKittrick is at her best when breezily explicating the notoriously difficult Wynter material in furtherance of her argument. McKittrick is a scholar of a class all her own, and while following in the tradition of many black feminist thinkers, establishes a paradigm that moves Wynter's thinking (slightly) in a new direction.