We were delighted when Katherine McKittrick, former Antipode editor and current trustee of the Antipode Foundation, agreed to present the 2021 Antipode American Association of Geographers Lecture. A recording of the lecture itself is available here, and the (open access) peer-reviewed, published version can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12773
Katherine’s 2021 Antipode AAG Lecture came hot on the heels of the publication of her latest book, Dear Science and Other Stories (Duke University Press, 2021). As we said at the time, Dear Science is a singular achievement, bringing together insights developed in earlier works—like Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006), Black Geographies and the Politics of Place (with the late Clyde Woods; Between the Lines, 2007) and Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Duke University Press, 2015), and “Mathematics Black Life”, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place”, “Plantation Futures”, “Rebellion/Invention/Groove”, and “Diachronic Loops/Deadweight Tonnage/Bad Made Measure”—and taking them forward to break new ground not just for Black geographies, but for critical geography and Black studies more broadly. The book is a creative, radically interdisciplinary meditation on Black methodologies and the inventive, collaborative, and, potentially, liberatory power of storytelling.
Indeed, we think it’s such an important work that earlier this year we organised a book review forum, inviting Ladipo Famodu (independent artist, designer and researcher) and Temitope Famodu (University of California-Irvine), Maria Ryan (Florida State University), Victoria Ogoegbunam Okoye (SOAS University of London), and Lioba Hirsch (University of Liverpool) to engage critically with it, attending to what emerges from their readings, and entangling Katherine’s ideas with their own work, exploring how they shape/move it.
Katherine responded to all four commentaries, and we think that the five essays make a wonderful, generative collection; we are thrilled to present it here.