Dear Science and Other Stories. By Katherine McKittrick. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021, 240 pp. (paperback) ISBN 9781478011040. US List: $24.95
Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories is an invitation to think and feel outside of our delimiting biocentric system of knowledge. This collection of stories and photographs theoretically/visually/sonically interrupts academic conventions with an interdisciplinary methodology that “is disobedient (rogue, rebellious, black)” (44). At every level of form, McKittrick’s stories (presented in columns, footnotes, lists, photographs, dances, or songs) are acts of rebellion. Notably, the book is not divided into numbered chapters, and the stories can be read in any order. Instead, Dear Science reverberates and resonates as “waveforms”—nonlinear, not teleological, not eschatological, not rigid, not fixed. Each connected story “exceeds all efforts to definitively pin it down”—purposefully evading description, categorization, systematization, and summation (71).
To engage with Dear Science is to fall in love with the world-making words of Sylvia Wynter, Édouard Glissant, and Frantz Fanon all over again. Wynter and McKittrick remind us that we are a “storytelling species” (9) who are steeped in, and struggle through, language—telling ourselves (and each other) stories in order to survive and make sense of the world around us. Dear Science narrates different stories about Black method and methodology, science, algorithms, music, geography, Black studies, liberation, friendships, collaboration, joy, memories, and Black livingness. Put another way, with Dear Science, McKittrick is “bringing human invention into existence”—«le véritable saut»1 (“the real leap”) that Fanon indexes (57).
Following Glissant’s notions of “errantry and relation and opacity,” as readers we reoriented ourselves with/in the text—with the story titles and subtitles serving as signposts (32). If, as McKittrick instructs, to “read creative texts as theoretical texts,” her work enables the reader to wonder and wander (119). Our curiosity leads us back to her second story, “Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor),” which exemplifies her rebellious, story-sharing, collaborative praxis. McKittrick writes, listens, and feels in communion with other creatives. We noticed that the footnotes exceeded the main text, then realized that the whole story is a footnote that leaves irreducible traces of Black life, world-making, and theorizing scattered across geographic space and time.
Oscillating back and forth between different stories, readers are re/introduced to work of M. NourbeSe Philip, Dionne Brand, Toni Morrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, Drexciya, Betty Davis, and many more. Returning to the main text, readers learn lessons from Wynter and McKittrick about our “present order of knowledge” (163) as “self-replicating” (23). Specifically, they learn that “radical theory-making takes place outside existing systems of knowledge and that this place, outside (demonic grounds), is inhabited by those who are brilliantly and intimately aware of existing systems of knowledge” (23). This process is conceptually rigorous, exhaustive, and heavy. As McKittrick demonstrates, “Citing is not easy. Referencing is hard” (17). McKittrick compels readers to ask more generative epistemological questions (how we know what we know) and rethink “where we know from” (107). As we were writing this review, we listened to Betty Davis’s “They Say I’m Different” in the background (see the photograph on page 94, the playlist on page 122, and footnote 8 on page 16). We sat with metaphor, citations, and sites of possibility; and we were reminded how “the ideas we share, the counsel we give each other—is an ongoing referential conversation about black humanity” (33).
From a “black sense of place” as a methodology attentive to relationality, McKittrick brings her readers where quantitative data and positivist mappings cannot. For instance, McKittrick’s story about writing an entry on “diaspora” for the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography is instructive. We observed how the discipline’s colonial authority—whereby space is “knowable” and “transparent”—is reified (180). Rather than cataloguing, making lists, and drawing maps in normative ways, we were once again invited to think outside of our present geographic order of knowledge that is underwritten by a “biocentrically induced accumulation by dispossession” (3, 74). Put differently, McKittrick’s “project of disavowal” is not about disciplining or institutionalizing diaspora in a fixed way (180). Instead, she posits that “diaspora geography” is “the act of sharing ideas about where liberation is and might be” (182). Throughout the book, McKittrick repeatedly illustrates how: “Description is not liberation” (39, 44, 45, 128). As a conceptual frame, Black studies engages in the ongoing “intellectual struggle” of seeking out liberation and aesthetically enacting what Wynter and McKittrick refer to as “being human as praxis” (70, 159).
McKittrick’s Dear Science is generous and expansive—disrupting normative disciplinary approaches often rehearsed in academic writing. It demands careful engagement and deep study. Whenever readers feel that they have a firm “grasp” on an idea, a place, or way of being, McKittrick unsettles the theoretical grounds beneath us. For “readers from elsewhere” who “want [and need] to understand everything,” Dear Science is a profoundly destabilizing and disorientating experience (in the best sense of the word) (171). By this we mean that we need to rethink what we cannot know and cannot have. Reading this book will, borrowing from Fanon, cause your heart to make your head swim («Le coeur me tourne la tête»2) (1).
