In Dear Science and Other Stories
Katherine McKittrick presents a creative and rigorous study of black
and anticolonial methodologies. Drawing on black studies, studies of
race, cultural geography, and black feminism as well as a mix of
methods, citational practices, and theoretical frameworks, she
positions black storytelling and stories as strategies of invention
and collaboration. She analyzes a number of texts from intellectuals
and artists ranging from Sylvia Wynter to the electronica band
Drexciya to explore how narratives of imprecision and relationality
interrupt knowledge systems that seek to observe, index, know, and
discipline blackness. Throughout McKittrick offers curiosity, wonder,
citations, numbers, playlists, friendship, poetry, inquiry, song,
grooves, and anticolonial chronologies as interdisciplinary codes
that entwine with the academic form. Suggesting that black life and
black livingness are, in themselves, rebellious methodologies,
McKittrick imagines without totally disclosing the ways in which
black intellectuals invent ways of living outside prevailing
knowledge systems.
