Encounters prompt unexpected responses and improvised ac- tions, as well as long-term negotiations with unforeseen outcomes, including both violence and love. Ethnographies of encounter focus on the cross-cultural and relational dynamics of these processes.
In terms of characterizing ethnographic places, “Ethnographies of Encounter,” pushes us to think about the contradictions, complications, and complexities of places/spaces. Spaces are produced and reproduced. These productions happen in multiples and due to multiple encounters and engagements with various groups. This text also thinks about the intimacy of certain encounters, as well as spatial knowledge. Using Mei Zhan’s work, in particular, the authors talk about worlding and the “awkward resonances that produce translocal encounters” (370).
McKittrick, Katherine. 2006. Demonic Grounds: Black Women And The Cartographies Of Struggle. First edition edition. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press.
Katherine McKittrick is a Professor in Gender Studies and the Graduate Program in Cultural Studies (Black Studies, Cultural Geographies, The Arts (music, fiction, poetry, visual art), Theories of Race, Interdiscplinarity) at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. Katherine McKittrick researches in the areas of black studies, anti-colonial studies, cultural geographies and gender studies. Her research is interdisciplinary and attends to the links between epistemological narrative, liberation, and creative text. Katherine also researches the writings of Sylvia Wynter.
Published in 2006, Demonic Grounds is McKittrick’s first book. It was published with the University of Minnesota Press and its topical areas are listed as “geography,” “women’s studies,” and “black studies.” It is not part of a larger edited series. McKittrick received her PhD in 2004, so my understanding is this is based on her dissertation project.
In Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, Katherine McKittrick navigates between the past, present, (possibly future?), archives, fiction, and material and real lives to explore the spaces and places of black women throughout history, specifically during around the time of the transatlantic slave trade. At its core, this book questions the geographic implications of various sites like slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacob’s attic, and more. For McKittrick, space is alterable, amendable, in constant flux. Space is not viewed from a single vantage point.
Here’s a list of terms and themes I think McKittrick works with throughout the book:Transparent space vs. opaque space (contesting space as just “is”)Three-dimensionality of spaceMateriality and its scalesRacial-sexual displacementDiaspora across space and timeUngeographic bodies and geographic domination How does difference become naturalized?
“... stress that if practices of subjugation are also spatial acts, then the ways in which black women think, write, and negotiate their surroundings are intermingled with placebased critiques, or, respatializations.” (xix) …”naming place is also an act of naming the self and self-histories…. Landscape does not simply function as a decorative background, opens up the possibility for thinking about the production of space as unfinished, a poetics of questioning” (xxiii) …”to use Doreen Massey’s metaphor, different layers of life and social landscape are sedimented into each other.
In terms of characterizing ethnographic places, and really space/place more generally, McKittrick’s work encourages us to think about the overlapping “physical, metaphorical, theoretical, and experiential contours” of a space. How do we think about places as three-dimensional? How do certain places overlap with “subjectivities, imaginations, and stories” (xiii)? When characterizing place, then, how do we navigate between the past, present, and possibly even the future?
McKittrick powerfully critiques traditional (white, patriarchal) and naturalized geographic knowledge, building off Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic to site/cite a different sense of place for black identities: as part, but not completely, of material and imaginative configurations of geography. Equipped with Sylvia Wynter’s notion of “demonic grounds,” she asserts black women’s historical-contextual locations within geographic organizations.
