Abstract
In Dear Science and Other Stories (2021), Katherine McKittrick, a Canadian professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, offers an archetype of practicing black and anticolonial interdisciplinary methodologies to “undo discipline,” i.e. interrogate the academic systems that discipline blackness (McKittrick, 2021, p. 41). Drawing upon black studies, studies of race, cultural geography, and black feminism, the book rethinks black storytelling and stories as methods to humanize science. This book is a continuation of her previous efforts to analyze the creative narratives of black intellectuals and artists, such as Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter, who resists the silencing and exclusion of black life replicated by academic systems of injustice (Hudson & McKittrick, 2014). This is exemplified by Wynter’s dislodging of the biocentric system in “Rhythm, or On Sylvia Wynter’s Science of the Word”. By gathering and deciphering stories in multimodal forms (such as footnotes, photographs, dances, songs, etc.) that illuminate black livingness, McKittrick’s work compellingly articulates how black intellectual life and esthetic practices help reimagine blackness and dismantle racism in academic institutions. Dear Science and Other Stories continues this work and speaks to readers who want to make more room for humanity in scientific systems.
McKittrick’s argument towoards the creation of new conditions of knowledge production is reflected in the book’s unusual structure. In Dear Science and Other Stories, McKittrick further experiments with anticolonial forms of writing in the academy that can produce space to make blackness more knowable and pay due respect to black insights. Building upon Frantz Fanon’s insight “I entered the lists,” McKittrick continues to rework the lists that impose geographic constraints on blackness (Hudson & McKittrick, 2014, p. 239), as is seen in the chapter “(I ENTERED THE LISTS).” Without numbered or ordered chapters, the book engages us to deviate from our normative ways of reading stories and think anew about what/how/where we know about black life. Moreover, the footnotes in Dear Science and Oher Stories exceed the main text, which transforms our disciplined ways of perceiving footnotes as marginal, ignorable, and insignificant. To question the deadly definitions of black worlds provided by scientific racism and biological determinism, McKittrick’s project calls for more possibilities of radically reimagining black life. This is demonstrated through the book’s rejection of settled conclusions and finalized conversations about how to do black studies refreshingly, forcefully, and collaboratively (McKittrick, 2021, p. 13).
What is most striking to me in this book is the way that it attempts to bridge the chasms established between science and stories constructed in traditional contexts. The title conveys McKittrick’s intervention in debates about science and stories. For those readers who are already familiar with science’s othering stories about black livingness, the title of the book makes them wonder why the author would hail “science” as a term of endearment. The book closes with a letter to “science” that personifies science and exemplifies McKittrick’s attempts to actualize the liberation of black livingness from its dehumanizing systems. The letter reads more like a plea for the reinvention (see more clarification of the term on McKittrick, 2021, p. 153) of science and collaboration between science and stories, rather than a tirade against science. McKittrick exhibits “other stories” ahead of the letter addressed to science, which I read as a strategy to combat science’s othering of stories. Furthermore, McKittrick presents the letter at the very end to encourage more conversations between science and stories, where she advocates for the sustaining of curiosity and wonder that can prompt more liberating and collaborative projects to realize black livingness.
Perhaps the most challenging point of McKittrick’s project is the way that story can be used as a method to challenge scientific racism, which repeatedly constructs racial-biological differences and insidiously describes black inferiority as objective truth. Drawing out the links and distinctions between story and science, McKittrick presents curious black stories to help us unknow what we know about black life in a site fixated with essentializing biocentric scientific systems. Because the story encourages readers “to imagine what it cannot tell,” the black stories that “share ideas in an unkind world” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 7) can inspire readers to know differently about black life and imagine a different world for accommodating black livingness. Unknowing encourages us to focus on how we know and what we know imperfectly, rather than “master[ing] knowing and centraliz[ing] our knowingness” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 17). Such unknowing is based on a thorough knowing of “existing systems of knowledge” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 23). Moreover, unknowing requires a collaborative praxis emerging from “a black sense of life” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 106), which can “reframe what we know by reorienting and honoring where we know from” (McKittrick, 2021, p. 107). In urging readers to actively unknow ourselves, Dear Science and Other Stories aims to encourage more rebellious intellectual conversations to contest the existing systems of knowledge and interrogate their reification of racial dehumanization.
Dear Science and Other Stories makes an obvious contribution to Black Studies, which is McKittrick’s primary audience. Yet its importance extends beyond that. All of us working in/for the humanities must understand our relationship with the sciences, which is an increasingly powerful force in the intellectual world today. McKittrick’s emphasis on stories offers resources for all branches of the humanities to find their place in this question and to push back against the encroachments of scientific racism.
