SoiferI VtP Annotation: Demonic Grounds

One crucial example McKittrick presents is when she traces Sylvia Wynter’s argument regarding the invention of Man, asserting that present orders of existence center on discourses of normalcy. It is the development and mapping of the uninhabitable and uneven archipelagos that reveal important ways in which Man’s geographies are overrepresented. Whereas Man1 dehumanized and disembodied subaltern populations by conflating their beingness with terra nullius, Man2 sought to guarantee in its middle-class model a foundation for a “normal being” and what needed to come under racial-sexual regulation. She argues that examining Man’s geographies reveals the limitations of existing geographic arrangements. Demonic grounds, on the other hand, put forth a geographic grammar that locates the complex position and potentiality of black women’s sense of place. She introduces music as a geographic act through which blackness can be read as a meaningful part of the landscape. She asserts that black women’s geographies challenge the “just is” of traditional geography, indicating an alterability of “the ground beneath our feet.” She claims that local-contextual experiences might be read beyond the margins, as part of an interhuman story that unhinges the body-self and expresses new forms of life that contest historically present, uneven, genres of human geography. Black women’s geographies and poetics challenge us to “stay human,” invoking how black spaces/places are integral to multiscalar geographic stories and how the question of seeable human differences put spatial and philosophical demands on geography.