Table of Contents

He Liked to Say that This Love was the Result of a Clinical Error  ix
Curiosities (My Heart Makes My Head Swim)  1
Footnotes (Books and Papers Scattered about the Floor)  14
The Smallest Cell Remembers a Sound  35
Consciousness (Feeling like, Feeling like This)  58
Something That Exceeds All Efforts to Definitively Pin It Down  71
No Place, Unknown, Undetermined  75
Notes  79
Black Ecologies. Coral Cities. Catch a Wave  83
Charmaine's Wire  87
Polycarbonate, Aluminum (Gold), and Lacquer  91
Black Children  95
Telephone Listing  99
Failure (My Head Was Full of Misty Fumes of Doubt)  103
The Kick Drum Is the Fault  122
(Zong) Bad Made Measure  125
I Got Life/Rebellion Invention Groove  151
(I Entered the Lists)  168
Dear Science  186
Notes and Reminders  189
Storytellers 193
Diegeses and Bearings  211

About the Author

Katherine McKittrick is Professor of Gender Studies at Queen's University, editor of Sylvia Wynter: On Being as Human Praxis, also published by Duke University Press, and author of Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle.

Reviews

“Drawing from black anticolonial thought and study, black poetics, music, and expressive arts, Katherine McKittrick's Dear Science and Other Stories is an experiment in materializing black method and black wonder in stories of black livingness and relation, in spite of conditions of racial colonial violence and antiblack science of maps, algorithms, and life chances. It insists on other sensoria, consciousness, creation, and knowing-a black sense of place.” - Lisa Lowe, author of (The Intimacies of Four Continents) “Freedom is a place made through rehearsals of thought and human-environment inter-action. Katherine McKittrick's stories show geography in the making through their persistent refusal to recite empirics of suffering and catastrophe. What a gift to travel these surprising, complex paths through rage toward life. I am grateful for this book.” - Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of (Change Everything! Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition) "In this innovative, rich work, Katherine McKittrick works tirelessly to make us aware of how Black thought is a form of knowledge production. McKittrick uses a fascinating essay structure - stories and letters to science - to discuss jazz, computer science, poetry, Black history, and more. It contains one of the most powerful analyses of scientific racism that I’ve read in recent times, arguing that sometimes our efforts to articulate race and racism as social phenomena actually reinforce the idea that they are somehow biological in nature." - Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Bookriot) "McKittrick’s prose is beautiful and timely, and she demonstrates that there is a cost to reducing Black life to any description without deep thought. Her readers-no matter their relationship to science-are pressed to question what we know, how we know, and who we know. Dear Science urges us to be cautious of a single narrative, to articulate our thoughts with exacting labor, and it provides insight into how we can create a universe beyond Black suffering." - Edna Bonhomme (The Baffler) "Reading the richly poetic and sonically-driven Dear Science, we can see the many complex projects and thoughts of McKittrick’s work. The stories are citational observations and calls for a theory and method of storytelling and reading practice as a way to undo discipline (41), a reimagination of the academic text as a genre and incomplete visions of defining ‘science’. The text itself is artfully arranged, breaking from the conventional academic structure. . . ."
  - Anna Nguyen (LSE Review of Books) "For those of us working inside, along, and through environmental studies, the environmental humanities, science studies, and all disciplines in between, Dear Science challenges us to confront the stories that our fields of study tell us about ourselves and the world around us and to consider what is possible if we center Black ways of knowing to imagine more equitable futures." - Erin Gilbert and Leah Rubinsky (ISLE) "You are my black feminist answer to Borges and his short story, 'On Rigor in Science.' In the rigor and incisiveness of your stories you challenge and dismantle singular, unified, totalizing representations, narratives of classification and ways of knowing and being that discipline and punish, stifle, crush and suffocate. In their stead, you offer and practice relationality, generative collaborative praxis, black creative consciousness, method, and life. Thank you." - Hazel Carby (Society and Space) "Dear Science is like no other scholarly book." - Dina Georgis (Society and Space) "Dear Science and Other Stories is a one-of-a-kind,theoretical-practical-creative work that promises to intrigue, inspire, and question the reader, urging them toward new relational ways of thinking and living. It is a wonderful book, which encourages the reader to step out of their comfort zone and to explore interdisciplinary and cross-theory-making and art, in and through Black creativity and ‘livingness’, storytelling, and ways of knowing." - Lena Anggren (Feminist Studies Association) "Katherine McKittrick's book about Black livingness and Black knowledge is a mind-altering and world-bending read that rarely leaves my side. I turn to it constantly, as a way to recognize the world that the Black studies tradition is constantly building. . . . A must-read for anyone interested in finding alternative ways of being and knowing rooted in abolition." - Orlando Serrano (Smithsonian Magazine) "Refreshingly, Dear Science . . . [shows] what science misses in trying to define Black spiritual and corporeal existence. McKittrick urges Black studies thinkers to resist the hold of biocentric knowledge and to imagine ways of being and thinking that exist beyond and beside it." - Cera Smith (The Black Scholar) "Dear Science is generous and expansive-disrupting normative disciplinary approaches often rehearsed in academic writing. It demands careful engagement and deep study. . . . Reading this book will, borrowing from Fanon, cause your heart to make your head swim." - Jade How and Gada Mahrouse (Lateral) "Each exquisite sentence of Dear Science is comprised of layers of meaning. Still, McKittrick thought carefully about the importance of readability. . . . On each page of Dear Science, readers will find a reminder that Black (livingness) is beautiful, complex, and brilliant." - Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (Catalyst) "Though McKittrick’s short book may seem humble, it offers a wide-ranging examination of both racist and liberatory methodologies. . . . To anyone working within Western academia, especially to those invested in anti-racist, feminist, and anti-colonial study, this book provides teachings, guidance, and support for re-examining one’s critical practices so they may better serve and imagine non-colonial futures." - Tavleen Purewal (Letters in Canada) "By reading in and with black studies, Dear Science is a discipline-shattering love letter to the possibilities imbued in the black imagination." - Ladipo Famodu & Temitope Famodu (Antipode) "McKittrick’s work, and Black Studies more broadly, are offering us a home, a safe space, outside, which is empowering and life-affirming and generous. I want us to applaud McKittrick’s work. I want us to celebrate and cherish and protect this place, outside, and to get lost in it." - Lioba Hirsch (Antipode)