
































Microsoft Word - Keith review.docx


 1 

 
 
KATHERINE MCKITTRICK. 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).   
 



 2 

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 “black livingness is unmeasurable,” (186). Her elongated 
scholarly project of underlining a ‘black sense of place’ engages the praxis of moving to the 
differential beat of black life that cannot be wholly defined by the calculable. Perhaps this can be 
discerned in her incorporation of musical measures- one story is a list of songs- as evidencing a 
black sense of place; a turn away from spatialized white supremacist algorithms to black ‘algo-
rhythms’ that improvise and move to a different geographical drum. 
 
Staying with the theme of music, McKittrick plays with uses of looping. She is concerned about 
the closed loop of scientific racism that feeds back into itself and can only ever compute 
“biocentric” outcomes that reify “racial-sexual differentiation,” (134) Subverting the loop of 
scientific racism, McKittrick talks about her practice of looping slides in public talks as a way to 
signal the various sources that inform her theorizing. She acknowledges the incompleteness of 
these visual loops yet emphasizes that they serve as a reminder of where her thinking rests in 
order to gesture where it can go. Looping as work-in-progress, arrival, and departure is 
duplicated in her repetitious syntax which brings the reader along on the journey of articulation. 
Looping is literalized in the section “(Zong) Bad Made Measure,” where the reader turns the 
pages and then reverses the page turn to read down and across columns. A stylistic ode to M. 
NourbeSe Philip’s longform poem Zong!, which newly-cycles text from Gregson v. Gilbert 
(1781) to interrogate the “diachronic loop” of racist violence in order to push against it. Zong!, 
and McKittrick’s columned writing on Zong!, write “in a nonlinear fashion” in order to “produce 
a knowledge system that momentarily moves outside of itself” (146). McKittrick acknowledges 
how looping remakes and breaks in complex ways but is a pivotal part of storytelling that seeks 
liberation.    
 
In the spirit of creative looping, I will wrap up this review by returning to the beginning of the 
book. McKittrick first story, titled “Curiosities (My Heart Makes My Head Swim),” asks the 
reader to stay with the precision of black methodology where “Wonder is study. Curiosity is 
attentive,” (5) Curiosity can be dizzying; it looks to the implications of scientific knowledge and 
unfurls opacity, immeasurability, possibility. Wonder skirts predetermined outcomes. This 
means eliding disciplinary and scientific attachments. But wonder opens a pathway to awe. 
Sustained, detailed curiosity seeks out the “already existing and unfinished and unmet 
possibility” of black livingness. This epistemological project challenges sciences that loop back 
to antiblack violence, and argues black people have always engaged in praxis across genres and 
mediums to “story the world” (4).   
 
While I am not an anthropologist, I am situated in the adjacent field of critical geography which 
uses similar tools to write about land, people, and palimpsests. McKittrick’s Dear Science and 
Other Stories implores social scientists to not return to the tired racialized story of socio-
scientific ‘facts.’ There is something radical to black knowledge systems that retain black 
livingness. This book should be read, not to know more, but to do better. Here, neither racism 
nor science can- nor should- be ignored, and at the same time, there are always registers of 
sharing ideas, dreams, curiosities even if the lexicon is incomplete. Dear Science and Other 



 3 

Stories phenomenally traverses disciplines, spaces, queries, black feminist praxis, media, and 
more to differently account for black humanity. Put whatever you are doing down, and pick up 
this book.  

   
P.S.: McKittrick released a six and a half hour Spotify playlist under the same title as an 
unofficial accompaniment to the book. This allows readers hear the storytellers she engages, to 
bop to its rhythms, to think beyond boundaries of genre, form, and field. Dear Science and Other 
Stories- book and playlist- saddles up to the edge and extends a hand. To riff on Ruth Wilson 
Gilmore: as every geographer knows, edges are also sensory experiences. A black sense of place 
where head and heart swim and sway.  

 

Kerry Keith is a Ph.D. Candidate at UC San Diego in the Department of Communication and 
Program in Critical Gender Studies. She is co-organizer of the Nature, Space, Politics faculty and 
graduate student initiative at UCSD, and a founding member of UCSD’s Underground Scholars 
chapter, and a researcher thinking through geographical production, toxicity, and prison 
abolition.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

© 2023 Kerry Keith 

  
 

 


