Dear Science and Other Stories

Abstract

In Dear Science and Other Stories Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and discipline blackness. Throughout, McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder, citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song, grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies, McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing knowledge systems.

Postcolonial M/Othering: Poetics of Remembering and Writing as an Invitation to Rememory

“…The enlivened space through these courses served as an undercommons (Harney & Moten, 2013); it provided a specific learning environment for engaging in an intellectual practice that mostly consisted of students and faculty of color. We not only began to rethink how to do the work that mattered to us, but we also worked to “stretch our brains” and refashion new ways of producing knowledge (McKittrick, 2021) away from the normative approaches to which we had been accustomed. We conceived what we believed to be a non-regulated space where we could trial our ideas and writing, in a manner that Harney and Moten (2013) would describe as “not simply the left-over space that limns real and regulated zones of polite society; rather, it was [is] a wild place that produced[s] its own unregulated wildness” (p. 7).…”

“…As m/Others, we also extend ourselves so our daughters can one day share in our racialized and gendered lives to navigate their future worlds. The (un)disciplined curiosity, thought, and rawness of the in-between offer us opportunities to learn and unlearn across many sites, thereby “coming to know, generously, varying and shifting worlds and ideas” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 5). In coming to know, we question what tools are available to us to navigate the colonial and the postcolonial worlds—the worlds that have created the Us and Them discourse.…”

“…Writing for our daughters, the telling-sharing of our stories, is where our curiosities live and become un/knowable. As McKittrick (2021) prods us about livingness, “Telling, sharing, listening to, and hearing stories are relational and interdisciplinary acts that are animated by all sorts of people, places, narrative devices, theoretical queries, plots” (p. 6). The process, as we have witnessed and tried to demonstrate here, is spurred by invention and wonder.…”

“…For y/our daughters, this collaborative and creative process of telling-sharing becomes a living testimony to what is possible in the world we live in—a world full of many unknowns, a world that is relational built on/through/within forms of kinship. We agree that “if the function of the story is to invite the reader-viewer-interlocutor-listener to feel, respond, and be moved, it also establishes powerful alignments (provisional or not) that are put to work with and for loved ones” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 8). That kind of work is what we desire.…”

The Limits of Justice-Informed Research and Teaching in the Presence of Antiblackness and Black Suffering: Surplus of Transformation or (Un)Just Traumatic Returns?

“…(Kevin Quashie, 2021, p. 5) If we shift our focus to embrace, more boldly and confidently, an analytic of black life and livingness, we centralize black humanity—not eschewing racism and racial violence but, rather, understanding that these practices have always engendered a different form of life that privileges our collective well-being. (Katherine McKittrick, 2021, p. 118) Put a finger to my wrist or my temple and feel it: I am magic. Life and all its good and bad and ugly things , scary things which I would like to forget , beautiful things which I would like to remember —the whole messy lovely true story of myself pulses within me.…”