Passages for Class Discussion
McKITTRICK, KATHERINE. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. NED-New edition. University of Minnesota Press, 2006. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttv711.
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“I add the dimension of geography […] in order to call attention to the ways in which the black body often determines the ways in which the landscape around the black body is read.10 This is not meant to suggest that black people do not own land, that stereotypes do not have lived repercussions, that geographic reclamations are irrelevant, or that blackness easily corresponds with poverty. Instead, it reveals that the question of ownership is often wrapped up in a legacy of race/racism “bolstered by compelling hierarchical categories, stereotypes of dispossession (captivity, lost homelands, evictions, joblessness, criminality, incarceration, welfare queens). So, the ways in which blackness has been translated as ungeographic is my central interest here, because it cites/sites how dispossession is an important racial narrative, which socially and economically rates ownership, domination, and human/life value” (McKittrick, 4)
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“Instead, they ask what this alienation brings to bear on processes of marginalization and how we might imagine black geographies in new ways. The material landscape itself, as it is produced by the black subject and mapped as unimaginably black, must be rewritten into black, and arguably human, existence on different terms. The various kinds of madness, the pathological geographies, the dismembered and displaced bodies, the impossible black places, the present-past time-space cartographers, and topographies of “something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there”—these material and metaphoric places begin to take us there. First, by recognizing the ways in which the social production of space is inextricably tied up with the differential placement of racial bodies. And second, through signaling a different sense of place, one which does not exactly duplicate the traditional features of geographic ownership that we seem to value so much” (McKittrick, 5).
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“Ownership of the body, individual and community voices, bus seats, women, “Africa,” feminism, history, homes, record labels, money, cars, these are recurring positionalities, written and articulated through protest, musics, feminist theory, fiction, the everyday.” (McKittrick, 3)
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Final Definition of Black Geographies:
“The linkages between transparent space and the space of the subject begin to clarify the ways in which black geographies can be conceptualized. While the power of transparent space works to hierarchically position individuals, communities, regions, and nations, it is also contestable—the subject interprets, and ruptures, the knowability of our surroundings. What this contestation makes possible are “black geographies,” which I want to identify as “the terrain of political struggle itself,” or, where the imperative of a perspective of struggle takes place. (McKittrick 6).
Prompt for Student Comments:
- Choose a passage above
- Quote a phrase or sentence
- Explain what you think it means.
- Connect your quote and explanation, to something we have discussed in class or that you have read.
Suggestion: If you need a place to start, consider, what kind of social status, recognition, description/character do black people have in Harlem? How do you know this or how do you think about Black people in relation to Harlem?
