McKittrick, Katherine, 2021, Dear Science and Other Stories, Durham: Duke University Press, 221 pp., ISBN 978-1-4780-1104-0

Keywords: black studies, feminist studies, production of knowledge, cultural geography, interdisciplinary

Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories is pulse, commitment, invitation, groove, gallery, curiosity, and so much more. It beautifully, carefully, and humbly charts black life as always more than the abstractions produced through scientific knowledge. McKittrick has long insisted that black geographies cannot analytically sustain the reductive and repetitious story of antiblack violence, and that there is always something outside the dominant disciplinary frame that runs parallel to- and which produces- black space and place. This book is organized into nineteen stories, seven of which are images and their sources. The abundance of these stories speaks to McKittrick’s generosity; she shares her thinking process by frequently building onto sentences as a mode of seeking out more apt articulations, playing with partial formulations, and continuously posing questions. Importantly, McKittrick begins, “from the premise that liberation is an already existing and unfinished and unmet possibility,” (13). This triangulation of here-ongoing-latent liberation provides a foothold of theorizing black livingness, where futures and histories comingle to exceed scientific- including social scientific- determinism.

In response to the unconventional book format, this book review focuses on various themes of the text rather than chapter breakdowns. One of the primary issues McKittrick takes up is the descriptive practices of scientific racism and its discursive resolutions. She acknowledges the social constructions of race but resists the epistemological drive across academic disciplines to reiterate a “teleological narrative” of blackness in terms of death and dying (135). This narrative of scientific racism begs an analytical question that only ever falls back on itself. Instead, she wants to “live with violence and…not ask for more and more and more evidence or proof of that violence” (138). The book’s aim is to point to black livingness that surpasses the “plantocratic-colonial registers” of academic sciences (145).  

Stories practice ways to share across disciplines, standpoints, mediums, techniques, and spaces. To do this, McKittrick advocates for a black citational practice that is “thick and wide ranging,” (35). She is against the limiting project of some feminist scholars who refuse to cite canonized white cismen, as she argues this obfuscates and further entrenches the chasms that split academic disciplines. Rather than drawing citational lines, she advocates for the importance of sharing as it is capacious and crosses boundaries. And she emphasizes that storytelling has been formative in her relationship with Sylvia Wynter. In their exchanges, she has found that the collaboration and surprise which emerges from “sharing stories is creative rigorous radical theory,” (73). 

Another important theme of the book pivots on meanings of measure. One the one hand, measure comes to the fore in algorithms that assess geographical determinations under the auspices of white supremacy. She draws on the example of predictive policing technologies that codify who lives, who is criminalized, and who counts in the projected futures of racial capitalism. On the other hand, she emphasizes that “