An Afro-Diasporic Conversation with Katherine McKittrick
by
Natália Alves da Silva
Katherine McKittrick is a writer, editor, and professor of Gender and Black Studies at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada. She is recognized for her significant contributions to race and gender studies, especially regarding Black geographies and interdisciplinary approaches. Her ongoing conversations with novelist and theorist Sylvia Wynter and poet M. NourbeSe Philip have become key reference points for understanding and evaluating thought and art produced within the African Diaspora. I became her reader in 2018, while completing my master's thesis in architecture and urban planning at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, which focused on the leading role of Black women in the housing struggle in Belo Horizonte. The challenge of finding bibliographical references that explored the relationships between race, gender, and space led me to the collection Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, edited by McKittrick in collaboration with Clyde Wood, and her article “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place.” In 2019, with my research completed and already working on the results in presentations, conferences, and articles, I came across Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, a book in which the author conducts an interdisciplinary reading of the geographies of Black women in the diaspora, attentive to the interaction between geographies of domination (such as transatlantic slavery and racial-sexual displacement) and the geographies of Black women (their knowledge, their negotiations, and experiences). The relationship between Black populations and geography, understood as space, place, and location in their physical materiality and imaginative configurations, enables engagement with histories that make visible Black social lives that are frequently displaced and which, although constituting the current geographical organization, are taken to be non-geographical. The book’s title draws on a concept developed by Jamaican theorist and novelist Sylvia Wynter: “demonic grounds.” Wynter’s term describes perspectives that exist beyond the dominant spatiotemporal framework of the human observer, highlighting how Black femininity is rendered both absent and present. This concept frames the demonic as a perceived lack—geographical, ontological, and historical—experienced by those subjected to racial and sexual constraints.
The opportunity to hear Professor McKittrick speak live during the annual meeting of the Association of American Geographers in Detroit last March—she was the honoree—only deepened my admiration for this fundamental thinker who has redefined the direction of gender and race studies in the context of the Afro-Diaspora. Seeing and hearing her "think aloud" led me to add an essential item to McKittrick's list of qualities: the passion with which she speaks about the topics studied in her work. Passion, as we know, is rare in academia, where distance, third-person discourse, and a pretense of objectivity are indisputable indicators of "true scientific thought," even when they are merely a performance.
Katherine McKittrick emphasizes the active role Black communities play in reshaping urban spaces and revitalizing geography. She states, "Our entire understanding of geography is transformed when Blackness is present. These places are discreetly policed, and at the same time, there is a reshaping of geography and a desire for liberation." Confronted with the transatlantic slave trade, enslavement, and racial terror, Black populations created spaces of resistance through collective memory and diverse practices—such as quilombos, palenques, brotherhoods, and terreiros. These spatial practices are embedded in territory and internal logics that challenge traditional separations: space and time, individual and community, subject and object, nature and culture, sacred and profane, celebration and daily life. These spaces are not isolated; rather, they are deeply connected to a “much more powerful social environment” (Du Bois 39). They interact with this environment in many ways: by incorporating dominant logics, confronting them, or seeking escape. As such, spaces of resistance are not fixed identities but represent community practices that are experimental and improvised.
McKittrick advocates replacing the singular term “resistance” with the phrase “practices of resistance” (McKittrick 11), thereby broadening the meaning of a concept often reduced in scope. By highlighting strategies of “imaginary and real re-spatializations,” these practices reveal an ongoing experimentation in daily life that has historically organized and sustained Black communities. Using resistance in the plural, as a set of practices, encourages us to consider ways of living shaped by careful, collective reflection—challenging the notion of absolute dominance by racist models, both during slavery and today.
This spring, the exhibition “A Smile Divided by the Stars” emerged as the culmination of years of research and creative engagement. Professor McKittrick produced the exhibition after extensive interaction with the work of Tobago-Canadian poet nourbeSe philip, to whom she dedicates a chapter in her book Dear Science, as well as several articles and essays. McKittrick’s deep interest in the arts, poetry, and music—always guided by her investigation of language and its importance in the lives of Black people—clarifies the significant influence her scholarship has on conversations about the African diaspora across multiple disciplines.
A conversation, not an interview, was the goal from the outset. That intention became clear after the initial contact in Detroit, when an email exchange about schedules and possible topics led to an unexpected response. Rather than focusing on her own work, my interlocutor expressed genuine interest in hearing about the issues driving my research. Once a date was finalized—after my return to Brazil and the completion of activities related to the PhD fellowship at New York University—the meeting took place in an online conference room. Katherine promptly inquired about the PhD and experiences in the United States, showing a keen desire to understand the context of my research. Attentive listening and thoughtful encouragement, delivered with vibrant enthusiasm, dissolved any sense of distance or academic hierarchy. The resulting exchange felt warm and friendly, bridging two people from countries of the Afro-Diaspora who were just beginning to know one another.
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N: So, I wanted to start just with your early formations and your early interests. If you can provide an overview of these early formative years, one significant moment that you felt that you had this interest in space, your spatial experience in the school, or your home space in your city. When, perhaps how, did you feel that space would become an investigative interest?
K: Thank you for that question. And it's a deep question because I came to geography, as a discipline, late. And as I reflect on my time as a child and later as a young adult at university, I realized that for black women, black femmes, black queers, moving through spaces is really meaningful. And I didn't notice that while I was growing up. When I was older, I learned how to look into these feelings of displacement, the work of space and place, when I took a course in feminist geography to kind of think back and understand how hard it was just to move through the world. I grew up in small Ontario towns, and they were mostly white towns. Often, my sister and I were the only black kids in school. There were all these different kinds of institutions or places that we moved in and out of where we were the only black folks. As I think about that now, I connect it to the work I am doing with nourbeSe philip, and I'm engaging with how she writes and understands black femininity and black girlhood as constrained by coloniality yet moving through the world. She moves through these spaces and subverts the constraints and, sometimes, reconfigures what they mean because just entering that space is meaningful. One of my favorite quotes from Simone Browne is from her Dark Matters, when she asks: “what happens when blackness enters the frame?” (Browne 1). We can take this and recontextualize it as what happens when blackness enters the room or walks down the street or moves through a workspace.
Our whole understanding of geography shifts when blackness is present. These places are overpoliced and then, at the same time, there is a remaking of geography and a desire for liberation. These are spatial processes we all experience, regardless of age and location, but that I didn't have the language for when I was incredibly young. When I began by PhD, my supervisor, Linda Peake, offered a course on Feminist Geographies. The course was a game-changer for me. It blew my mind because I was interested in black studies and I was interested in the work of black creatives, Toni Morrison, nourbeSe philip, musicians like Missy Elliott. This course allowed me to think about how these women were mapping the world in ways that were radically anti-colonial. And they did this through creative texts and imagination. That course gave me the courage to think about how to ground these beautiful creative works by noticing how geography, space, and place are written and dreamed by and for black women. The course allowed me to ask new questions about black creative works. And at the same time, it gave me the time to really study the discipline of geography. I studied Henri Lefebvre, Steve Pile, Doreen Massey, Neil Smith, Linda McDowell, Linda Peake, Clyde Woods, Ruthie Gilmore, Bobby Wilson, among others. There was a lot of reading! And these became Demonic Grounds. And I will say that it was very important to have a supervisor like Linda Peake who was so open to just letting me have my voice but teaching me the rigor of learning a discipline. In particular geography, a discipline that I knew nothing about. I clearly remember her saying “read this” while handing me Clyde Woods’ Development Arrested! I can’t imagine my world without that book in it.
N: Demonic Grounds had a significant impact on my thinking. In the early 2010s, I was working with groups of black women in diverse contexts of struggle for land, territory, and housing in Minas Gerais. We collaborated in various fields, including discussions about fundamental rights such as access to basic sanitation, school places for children, employment, and income, as well as identifying cases of gender-based violence. We also organized mass gatherings for the construction of houses, community centers, and ecological pits. Still working on these activities, in 2015, I reconnected with the university, and it struck me how much of the literature produced on urban conflicts and housing rights tended to overlook the experiences of these individuals and the significant role of race and gender in shaping the production of space. Or, when these issues were considered, it was often through the naturalization of social roles or atypical interpretations of suffering, resistance, warrior women, and similar analyses. It was a great challenge to construct a text, which became my master's dissertation, seeking to build a counterpoint to this kind of interpretation. It was very important to read Demonic Grounds. Because it gave me the tool to create a particular type of conversation, even from a distance. It felt though as I was hugged. These reflections helped shape my subsequent academic and artistic work. I want to ask you more about the process of writing Demonic Grounds. How do you shape your work? What can you tell us about the repercussions of this work?
K: You pointed to one of the more significant desires that came with that book:to travel because ideas travel, and diaspora is a migratory condition. And this goes well with your insights: what happens when we come to better understand black women's sense of space when they're involved in social struggles, particularly when they are not committed to replicating the system as we know it. And that is where the work of Sylvia Wynter really helped me write Demonic Grounds. I wanted to write about and theorize black women's geographies without falling into the trap of owning things, which is what the discipline of geography, and other academic fields, too, encourage. This could be owning space, it could be owning ideas… all these kinds of ownerships move through our worlds. Wynter provided that framework. She calls it ‘the demonic ground,’ which is where Caribbean women are situated.
They are unseen and unacknowledged in the present system of knowledge, yet they are also part of this system (they are in it, even if they are not considered to be of it). This positionality gives them a view of the world that is incredibly unique because they are unseen yet cognizant to how that system works and what its limitations are. The perspective that is generated from “demonic grounds” allows them to observe how that system is replicating itself, over and over, in very unjust and violent ways. They can, therefore, provide an alternative geography or an alternative way of living and surviving the world. Engaging Wynter’s essay and the idea of demonic ground gave me the conceptual tools to rethink what black women or black feminist geographies can do that is different from normative spatial practices, which are teeming with acts of proprietorship. This was sort of in my heart all the way through that first book. It allows you to think about how the production of space might not be about power, or conquest, or wanting to participate in our present system of knowledge. Wynter is not saying that. She's showing us that Caribbean women have the capacity to, and are, re-conceptualizing the world and re-spatializing the world and re-politicizing the world, all at once. They are giving us a just sense of place. Without Wynter, I don't think I would have gotten there. I would have argued: “Look at how oppressed and resistant these women are”. And instead, she allowed me to ask: how are these women’s stories a lesson in doing anti-colonial work, that is, how do the geographic and conceptual stakes of belonging change when black women enter the frame?
The other important practice, a second organizing frame for Demonic Grounds, is thinking through diaspora as a geography that always breaches the desires of the nation-state. And there I think of the work of Stuart Hall, Carol Boyce Davies, Paul Gilroy, and several people who are in diaspora studies and recognize that the nation, the promises of the nation, the promises of citizenship, were never experienced by black folks and never will be. Diaspora and diaspora geographies vary because this frame allows one to think through the significance of the Middle Passage and the brutal exile of black folks during and after transatlantic slavery, while also thinking about where they and we landed and made new worlds. Here I find the work of Édouard Glissant really helpful— he allows us to see how terrible displacement provided the conditions for black communities to remake geography in terms that challenge blood-land assumptions and the negativity that is attached to alternative versions of belonging. The creative text allows you to map out those connections and disconnections and worldings. The third framework for Demonic Grounds was the concept of scale. I was at a PhD workshop and Ruth Wilson Gilmore was a faculty advisor there and she listened to my presentation on my project of black geographies and recommended— insisted, actually— that I think about scale. I read the work of Neil Smith and Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and used scale to organize my thoughts. The book itself moves from the scale of the body to the scale of the plantation and town to the more global scale of Wynter’s wide-ranging geographies.
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The book was taken up in such positive ways. I continue to be inspired by the research of LaToya Eaves, Camilla Hawthorne, Marshall (Kai) Green, Alex Moulton, Willie Wright, Adam Bledsoe, Brittany Meché, and others who took these ideas and ran with them and turned them into something new, too. LaToya held a 10th anniversary panel in 2016 around the book— it was a surprise for me! Those in the audience had so many wonderful things to say about Demonic Grounds. I think I've been fortunate with how the book is taken up, especially by junior scholars who are now geographers. They reach out, they send emails and invite me to do keynotes and things like that. They honored the book in really brilliant ways and also built their own incredible projects, with their own voices and ideas and senses of place.
This work means a lot to me because right after the book came out I received a lot of requests for keynotes and presentations, and they always asked if I would present on the auction block— it was as if that was all they could see and all they desired. They were kind of wishing for a presentation of what Saidiya Hartman calls scenes of subjection. They wanted a presentation that described and detailed the oppression of black women, men, and kids. It was the most difficult chapter to write. I hated writing it. I hated reading about it. I hated everything about the auction block. I kind of refused to give them that chapter or presentation. And that's when I wrote “Plantation Futures,” the essay. I started presenting different versions of it right after *Demonic Grounds* was published (McKittrick, "Plantation Futures"). I thought: “if you really want to hear about black geographies, this is what I'm going to share with you, which is a more in depth conversation about plantation geographies”. This also allowed me to think about parts of “Demonic Grounds” that went missing while also circumventing the scenes of subjection for a moment. The auction block chapter was painful and to write about racial violence is dizzying. I am sure you have felt this. Those moments when you're just kind of sitting there and wondering… do I even want to write this out? It feels like a celebration of oppression. We must ask ourselves: how do we avoid that? And that's the hard work: just sitting there and finding a way to write about negativity of racial violence without celebrating it.
N: This is important. We can’t avoid the topic, and I believe we should not shy away from it. It is a foundational act, a geographic matter, but how can we talk about all this brutality in a way that is beneficial for our emancipation? Your article “Black sense of space” is an essential reference to discuss these matters because it points out different ways to talk about black geographies and black spatialities, considering brutality and thinking about the agency of black people.
K: A black sense of place began with my reading of Doreen Massey's work and it moved, from there, to a more steady study of how black people move through the world if enclosure and surveillance, incarceration, and over-policing are shaping our worlds. I find it to be a useful concept because it identifies many different aspects. It is multiscalar. It is how we feel but also where we are and how we dream. It notices the psychic, the street, the concrete, the trees, how we walk in and out of doors. Sometimes, I think, it might be too big, but I also know it’s hard to capture how black people move through the world. It is hard to map our “where” not only because of over-policing but also because we inhabit demonic grounds! Where we are, on our own terms, is unintelligible!
N: And this allows us to do all of this work. You are always talking about interdisciplinarity, imagination, experimentation, effective label as part of the black method. Dear Science is a defense of interdisciplinarity as a black method and the idea that interdisciplinarity is related to a lack of rigor. I would like you to comment on this relationship between interdisciplinarity, black modes of knowledge production, and the rigor or construction of the redefinition of rigor.
K: I was just talking about this with my partner Zilli this week. I was talking to him about “Sylvia Wynter” and “Dear Science”, and how Sylvia and I spent kind of seven years together working on the interview in “Being Human as Praxis”. I would go to Oakland, and I would sit at her table, and she would have everything ready. All the books and papers and essays and everything else. It was gorgeous— the way she welcomed me into her intellectual space. we would read and write and talk and she would prepare lunch. Watching her read and work was stunning because she physiologically responded to our conversation. She moved with her ideas— the intellectual work that she was doing was also embodied and moving! She is talking really very high-level, really thick and complicated ideas and multiple global histories and I'm taking notes like crazy because I can't keep up. Even though what she is conveying could be interpreted as her maintaining a scholarly distance— because it is so high-level, so academically rigorous and far-out and inventive— Sylvia feels it. I thought: “wow, she believes with all her heart that we can shift the terms of what it means to be human and what Blackness means and what black livingness means”.
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I tell this story because witnessing that was a confirmation that we are, as she says, hybrid beings, bios-and-mythoi. I think at this time my attachment to her sense of place, her worldview, was confirmed. I believe Wynter. That's one piece, the way she actualizes her theoretical insights. The other piece connected to that story is the confirmation that we are also interdisciplinary beings. To think about black diasporic work, black geographies, one must bring in the creatives to help out because they complement and enhance and write and rewrite the social scientific and scientific knowledge that we have (black creatives are livingness!). We cannot privilege one stream of thought or assume that science and creativity are oppositional. That doubleness has always been incredibly important to me. One of the questions I had early on in my studies was to investigate how did Toni Morrison imagine and write these geographies in The Bluest Eye? I eventually arrived at this answer: what she is laying out in this novel, these space and places are, for me, believable geographies. They are more believable to me than straight social scientific data that say black people live “here” or “here.” I needed to put the social science data (black people live here) and Morrison (Claudia lives here) in order to wrap my head around the depth of black geographies. Interdisciplinarity is useful because it challenges academic disciplines and disciplinary thinking. It also challenges the objectivity of what we call science or the natural sciences without abandoning them. It's also incredibly useful to have the data. It matters where black people live, it matters how we organize our worlds cartographically. To enhance the scientific data with song or story actually shifts, however, where black people live because it humanizes our sense of place.
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The rigor question is hard. I was listening to an interview with Paul Gilroy where he mentioned that some students want articles that are compatible, lengthwise, with their cell phone. I feel that. Some students expect bite-sized lessons. The constraints on educational institutions paired with organized abandonment and other factors like our attachment to technology and fast-moving information has resulted in truncated teaching and learning. Some students work full-time, some students call themselves clients. Even though I worked full-time throughout all my degrees, we live in a different world than when I was a PhD student. Time is understood differently. A lot of my students and colleagues are organizers or work or care for family (this is rare at my institution, which is pretty elite). To sustain a PhD at when your labor is stretched across different economies is hard. My gut says just keep reading, do what you can. Read, read, read. That's what Octavia Butler taught us, folks like Sylvia Winter or Lisa Lowe. Lisa Lowe reads! Deeply. To read across disciplines is also difficult. We cannot master everything, but we can read across, and we can come to know our topic in interdisciplinary ways.
I wrote this paper on the bass, and I read everything I could find on bass, and I read Charles Mingus's autobiography, I read bass tabs, and physics texts on sonic booms. I read about James Jamerson and Marcus Miller, and I listened to a lot of Anthony Jackson, and I initiated conversations with musicians and scholars who know about the bass. I read a set of texts where I could have a rigorous understanding of the bass and bass sounds to learn about the instrument and learn from the instrument, too. Rigor is important. Interdisciplinarity can be interpreted as thin scholarship and the scholar, you or me, might feel like they are not reading enough. That is why it is hard to do well. But I think it is worth the risk to step outside normative patterns and explore. It is like gathering knowledge without assuming that you can master it. And it's enjoying the gathering of knowledge and being in love with ideas. And that, for me, takes you where we want to go.
N: Reading is also about curiosity and the joy of discovering something new, or recognizing how much there is still to learn and continuing to explore. However, in academic environments that prioritize the accumulation of knowledge, exams, and evaluation over meaningful connections and inquiry, reading can sometimes become a discouraging task. The excitement of making connections and exploring ideas is lost when the focus shifts away from genuine engagement.
K: We are taught that education is a test and a punishing task. We enter into a system that tells us we are going to fail the test because we haven't read enough Foucault or whoever. That is the colonial underpinnings of education. We grew up to be tested and get good grades and not be curious. We must work on undoing this kind of test-pattern in our brains and learn to stay in love with ideas and wonder. Because, at least for me, that is also about being in love with liberation and the possibility of liberation. It's getting intimate with freedom and freedom-making.
N: One aspect of your work I deeply value is the way you clarify the connection between knowledge and the struggle for emancipation, and how you encourage broader understandings and practices of change. I am especially interested in your discussion of memory. In my doctoral research, I analyze the 1995 commemorations organized by the Brazilian Black movement for the 300th anniversary of the "immortality of Zumbi dos Palmares." These commemorations included a nationwide series of events, culminating in a national march in Brasília that gathered 30,000 participants from across Brazil. In Belo Horizonte, these activities led to the 1st International Black Art Festival, which welcomed delegations from 14 countries and multiple Brazilian states. Memory, in this context, becomes an embodied, collective, and festive practice—a central force uniting and energizing these events. In Dear Science, you describe memory as a field of possibility for taking action in the present and imagining a near future. I would like to ask how you understand the relationship between memory, imagination, and Black experience, and how you see this radical Black practice nourishing the ongoing work of liberation—ensuring that memory remains a source of empowerment, rather than an oppressive narrative that can be appropriated.
K: I love that— you said it. I feel a bit entranced by what you said because you are pointing,returning, and gathering the past, knowing that the return is imperfect, that the past is imperfect. How do we hold on to past liberatory struggles without also authenticating them or being nostalgic about when times were “better”? Morrison’s concept of the site of memory is really helpful because in a way she spatializes memory by building a past in place, and therefore employs imagination, which is crucial to freedom-making. At the same time, she is always pointing to how the site of memory is real, concrete. One of the most cited Toni Morrison passages is when she is spatializing about the Mississippi in these concrete and imaginative ways. She tells us how when the Mississippi river floods, it is not, in fact, flooding— it is remembering where it used to be. I mean!! And then she says something in lines of: for writers, our imagination is flooding. She gives us everything here: the past, the present, loss, memory, ecology, water, settlements, writing, placemaking. It's an entanglement of memory, imagination, and the actual three-dimensional space of the Mississippi River. The site of memory is what we should reach for, conceptually, if we are going to engage with the past, if we are going to return. It is a layered geography, it's psychic, it's imaginative, it’s provisional, shifting, but it is also concrete and grounded. It is the groundedness that allows us to see the three-dimensionality of black geographies, the Mississippi, and Morrison’s complicated concept.
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Morrison’s work is so brilliant. I wonder if I miss her. I also find “the living memory of slavery” useful for thinking about the past, memory, history, loss. This concept is from the last chapter in Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic. The concept draws attention to how slavery animates but does not determine the present. I write about this in “Plantation Futures”. That is, there is a tendency to say the plantation existed and then it was thrust forward and it became the prison, and as though nothing had changed or as though they're the same thing, the same geography. But they are not the same thing. The living memory of slavery does not allow us to conflate the past and the present. It allows us to think about how the past informs the present,but it also notices when time is broken or fractured or uneven. This kind of concept allows me to be careful with memory and not assume that there is a straightforward line between the past and the present. The site of memory, living memory, gives me the intellectual room to be cautious and careful about return and loss. In terms of the collective memory, I wonder how we sustain those memories in ways that are not nostalgic, that can be collective, that can change over time, and empower us in ways that aren't seriously problematic? I think that's the tricky question. There's a documentary film with June Jordan talking about the Black Power Movement and how the struggle was for collective freedom across gender identifications and how, a few years later, black power women were asked to walk behind the men. She points out how patriarchy came to shape collective freedom-making.
N: Memories are shaped by power struggles over which narratives are preserved and which are erased, often by suppressing contradictions. The 1960s were a tumultuous time: in 1964, a coup in Brazil led to a U.S.-backed dictatorship that lasted twenty-one years, marked by repression of popular movements, a ban on discussing racism, growing poverty, and increased economic dependence. In 1965, the U.S. occupied the Dominican Republic and escalated involvement in Vietnam. At the same time, President Lyndon B. Johnson initiated the “Great Society” in the U.S., resulting in landmark laws like the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. Reflecting on this era highlights the diverse challenges faced by Black people worldwide and underscores the need to create memories that foster solidarity and honor the complexity of this history.
K: And that's why geography matters, I think. And that's why diaspora is useful because it requires that you be patient and you think across spaces and think generously. What is happening in the sixties shows the different ways that global and diaspora blackness is uneven and “owned” by the US or African Descendants of Slavery (ADOS). There is the complicated way that blackness gets articulated in relation to African Americans and black US scholars, a kind of authentication of a “real” blackness based on geography. And so how do we not do that?
N: Regarding “Dear Science”, I would like to ask you about the topic of interdisciplinarity and the intention behind the form of the academic text. You organize the book into stories, not chapters, and this decision structures the book's path. A playlist accompanies the book, and at various points, the reader is encouraged to listen to the songs. There are changes in the layout of the text, images, and different paper textures. I'd like you to comment more on these formal investigations and the role of interdisciplinarity in the book.
K: I have been thinking about creatives as scholars for a while—bassists, singers, drummers, novelists, DJs. In “Dear Science”, I was trying to meld creative forms with academic forms. I wanted to visually and discursively think about how to present interdisciplinarity as an activity, which meant finding new or different ways to present my ideas. This also goes back to my comments on Wynter working and how she moves with her ideas. Of course, I cannot capture that, but it seems to me that she is shifting the form of the scholarly essay if she is affectively or physiologically moved by it. I don't know if I was successful or not conveying this in “Dear Science”, but I really wanted to turn the language of interdisciplinary black studies into a material object, into something visual and tactile that speaks to but also veers away from the academic form.
I requested the press make a set of books with vellum paper inserts, I reprinted photographs and bibliographies, I used columns to nod to slave ledgers. I saw these and other inventive forms in creative texts and scholarly texts, too. I wanted the playlist, and I wanted it not just to be songs I love. I wanted to bring people into the book I admire, who have taught me a lot about music so they could be part of the story that I'm trying to tell about what black people do and how they use interdisciplinary methodologies to shift how we understand the world. I love music. It moves me and really has saved my life in lots of ways. With the playlist I was able to collaborate but also respond to collaboration. Some songs I didn’t know, some songs I didn’t like, and I had to come to terms with how collaboration is an ambivalent process. I started listening to songs differently, and I also started doing more collaborations with students, designers, colleagues, artists. I have also been making books. I've been working with Cristian Ordóñez, who's wonderful. He's a designer and photographer and we have made three books so far. We did two editions of that, and then we just did an installation on nourbeSe philip’s work with my colleague Nasrin Himada, and it came with a book as well. I am interested in how to activate interdisciplinarity and how to present academic ideas in beautiful ways. I love writing essays, I love academic ideas, but I wanted to take the academic form and make it into something new. Collaboration is one way I have been able to think about and work on different forms and formations and subvert existing scholarly norms. For the books we made, for example, we gave them away as gifts and donated them to libraries because we wanted to move away from the idea of “owning” or “buying” ideas.
N: To end, I would like to ask you about your work with the poet nourbeSe philip and about the process of building the recent exhibition A Smile Split by the Stars based on your work with her.
K: It was so great. I really have these moments in my life where I say: “I'm done, my dream has come true”. This was one of them. I've been working with nourbeSe philip’s writings since I was a graduate student. For 20+ years, the poem that stood out for me “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones”, which is in the middle the collection “She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks”. I've been sitting with that poem forever and I have never known what to do with it. I have never grasped it or been able to write about it. That collection of poems has always sat on my desk and some days it felt as though that poem was just staring at me while I did nothing! It just is there, staring at me. When I was invited to give the Wynter lecture at University College London, Kings, I thought: “I have to write about this poem and I'll use Wynter to read the poem”. At that that time I'd already met up with Cristian andNasrin, and we started working on this together, and created this beautiful installation that is anchored to “Meditations” as an iterative poem about black rebellion. I commissioned four creatives to read the poems, my student and I, Muna Dahir, worked with nourbeSe’s archives, and we commissioned a photographer to take pictures of selected papers. And, with the help of Sameen Mahboubi, Gallery 44 put it on. Nasrin said the installation felt like a book. You walked in and there was the poem on one wall, and there were these posters on the other wall, just pieces of the poem, that you could tear away and take home with you.There were two giant photographs of nourbeSe’s archives in the back, and then another room where you could hear audio mash ups of the poets reading Meditations. In the same room there was a slideshow of the archives that had to do with this poem and this book of poetry. This was the project that allowed me to realize all these ideas that I've had for so long. It puts that poem that sits on my desk in a new context, in a room and engage with these different tactile versions of this beautiful poem.
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I have been thinking about the terms “actualize” and “realize” that Wynter uses in her writing, and this project allowed me to actualize or realize what I call nourbeSe philip’s revolutionary intention. So rather than saying something is complex or opaque or improvised on paper, in an academic essay, I have begun to ask: how might we pair those words and thoughts and theorizations as an actualization of freedom, even if it's just for a moment. It probably only will be for a moment. And this, to loop back, is why I love bass! It is a realization of groove, the low frequencies move through walls, it shakes us.
Works Cited
Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015. JSTOR,
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11cw89p.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Philadelphia Negro: a Social Study. Series in Political Economy and Public Law nº 14. University of
Pennsylvania, 1899.
McKittrick, Katherine. Dear Science and Other Stories. Duke University Press, 2021.
———.. "On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place." Social & Cultural Geography, vol. 12, no. 8, 2011, pp. 947-963.
Taylor & Francis, doi:10.1080/14649365.2011.624280.
———.. Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
———. "Plantation Futures." Small Axe, vol. 17, no. 3, 2013, pp. 1-15. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/532740.
QUOTE AS:
Natália Alves da Silva. An Afro-Diasporic Conversation with Katherine Mckittrick. The Living Commons Collective Magazine. N.4, March 2026. p. 100-116
