DEAR SCIENCE and Other Stories

K AT H E R I N E M c K I T T R I C K
 DEAR SCIENCE AND OTHER STORIES

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 ERRANTRIES
A series edited by Simone Browne,
Deborah Cowen, and Katherine McKittrick

Ser ies Editor ia l A dvisory Boa r d

Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Paul Gilroy,
Gayatri Gopinath, Avery Gordon, Richa Nagar,
AbdouMaliq Simone, Françoise Vergès,
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Bobby Wilson

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 D E A R S C I E N C E and Other Stories

Katherine McKittrick
DUKE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS  DURHAM AND LONDON  2021

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 © 2021 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-­f ree paper ∞
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Arno Pro and Trade Gothic by Copperline Book Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McKittrick, Katherine, author.
Title: Dear science and other stories / Katherine McKittrick.
Other titles: Errantries.
Description: Durham : Duke University Press, 2021. | Series: Errantries |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2020016402 (print)
lccn 2020016403 (ebook)
isbn 9781478010005 (hardcover)
isbn 9781478011040 (paperback)
isbn 9781478012573 (ebook)
Subjects: lcsh: African Americans—Study and teaching. |
African Americans—Social conditions. | Race—Philosophy. | African
American feminists. | Cross-cultural studies.
Classification: lcc e185.86 .m355 2021 (print) |
lcc e185.86 (ebook) |
ddc 305.896/073—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016402
lc ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016403

Cover art: Farley Hill National Park, Barbados.

Photo by Katherine McKittrick.

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 For Sylvia.
For Ellison,
again.

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 CONTENTS

xi HE LIK ED T O SAY TH AT THIS L OV E WAS THE R ESULT OF A CLINICA L ER ROR

1 Curiosities (My Heart Makes My Head Swim)

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

211 DIEGESES AND BEARINGS

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 There is no life that is not geographic.
 — Ruth Wilson Gilmore

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 H E L I K E D T O S AY T H AT T H I S L O V E WA S

T H E R E S U LT O F A C L I N I C A L E R R O R

Ray Zilli Ricky Varghese Ashon Crawley

Ellison Zilli Deb Cowen Ben Carrington
Simone Browne Sarah Haley Elleza Kelley
Alexander Weheliye Treva Ellison SA Smythe
Dina Georgis Nikolas Sparks Tanya Titchkosky
Ruth Wilson Gilmore Mark V. Campbell Scott Morgensen
Craig Gilmore Nick Mitchell Andy Kent
Demetrius Eudell Barnor Hesse Nik Heynen
M. NourbeSe Philip OmiSoore Dryden Sharad Chari
Cindi Katz Razia Dawood LaMonda Stallings
Eric Lott Asha Tall Mecca Sullivan
Sammi King Tia-­Simone Gardner Grace Adeniyi-­
Carmen Kynard Dylan Robinson Ogunyankin
Barby Asante Cora Gilroy-­Ware Tau Lewis
Ken Wissoker Steven Osuna Vinay Gidwani
Nik Theodore Temi Odumosu Terrie Easter Sheen
Barrington Walker Linda Peake Shana Redmond
Kiese Laymon Esther Harvey Saidiya Hartman
Kara Keeling Karen de Souza Erika Ibrahim
Trish Salah Bedour Alagraa Yasmine Djerbal
Richard Iton Kara Melton Esther Kim
Fred Moten Kendall Witaszek Danyel Haughton
Laura Harris Maya Stitski Yaniya Lee
Lidia Curti David Scott Carl James
Iain Chambers Avery Gordon Elliott Jun
Marcus Gilroy-­Ware Jenny Burman Krista Franklin
Charmaine Lurch Minelle Mahtani Daniella Rose King

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 Stephanie Simpson Sunny Kerr Richa Nagar
Liz Millward Adam Elliott-­Cooper Carolyn Prouse
Olivia Gross Clyde Woods Jessica Ryan
Hunter Knight Kristin Moriah Carole Boyce
Lynn Ly Ken Hewitt Davies
Kim Khanh Tran Fe Hewitt Jacqueline Nassy
Chanda Prescod- Romi Morrison Brown
Weinstein Sivamohan Valluvan Brittany Meché
Sharon Y. Rodgers Shana M. Griffin Darcel Bullen
Tariq Jazeel Kate Mariner Jade Brooks
Sandra Brewster Prince Robin D. G. Kelley
Jenny Pickerill Scott Rutherford Beverley Mullings
Hazel Carby Renée Green Lisa Lowe
AbdouMaliq Simone Leslie Sanders Vron Ware
Dionne Brand Joshua Tranen Paul Gilroy
Bianca Beauchemin Errol Nazareth Sylvia Wynter

I have been experimenting with these and other stories for a long
time. Thank you to the many students, faculty, staff, who invited
me to share these ideas, as well as colleagues and friends who par-
ticipated in panels, symposia, workshops, conversations. The feedback
has been, and is, invaluable, admired, and appreciated. Many thanks to
all those who administered and arranged travel, accommodations, and
day-­to-­day activities during visits elsewhere. The referee comments are
cherished. The readers encouraged me to think with and through this
project and imagine sites-­citations unseen. My parents, Valerie Brodrick
and Robert McKittrick, have provided decades of support and love for
which I am grateful. In addition to camaraderie and an indescribable criti-
cal eye, Simone Browne read a few iterations of Dear Science — thank you
for taking the time to support these stories in a world that effaces black
time. Ruthie Gilmore offered generosity, notes, time, stories, space, fu-
tures, friendship. Sylvia Wynter’s conversation, kindness, and commit-
ment to black intellectual life is admired, always. Zilli, endlessly curious
and studied, provided scaffolding, contexts, walls, shelves, books, writ-
ings, ideas, love, photographs, songs, codes, mechanics, guitar tabs, nota-
tions, grooves that are immeasurable. Shortcomings weigh; the imper-
fections within are all mine. There are songs and musicians referenced
throughout these stories and, still, the blap-­zomp-­tonk is unsatisfactorily

xii  He Liked to Say That This Love

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 tracked and remains somewhat quiet and unlisted. I appreciate the mu-
sicians who interrupted and complemented these stories as well as the
dozens of friends and colleagues who provided recommendations, shared
songs and albums, and passed on playlists and car tapes (for the latter I am
indebted to Cam McKittrick). These stories were, in part, supported by
the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (Insight Develop-
ment Grant and Insight Grant) as well as the Antipode Foundation.

Was the Result of a Clinical Error xiii

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 CURIOSITIES (MY HEART MAKES MY HEAD SWIM)

D ear Science and Other Stories is a collection of ideas I have been

gathering since about 2004.1 The project began as a curiosity. I
was originally interested in how race is attended to in feminist
science and technology studies and how black feminists and black schol-
ars work through the thorny racial privileges and biases that animate this
field. My contribution to this conversation was to center black creatives
(poets, musicians, visual artists) and think through how they attend to
science in their work. I sat with June Jordan’s kerosene and irradiation and
phosphorescence.2 I sat with the kerosene and irradiation and phospho-
rescence not to discount scientific racism and biological determinism, but
to ask questions about how black worlds are not always wholly defined by
scientific racism and biological determinism. I sought to draw attention
to how black creatives work with scientific concepts in innovative and hu-
manizing ways — attentive to racism, yes, but not understanding scien-
tific racism as the only way to define black life.3 This was complemented

The title of this story, “My Heart Makes My Head Swim,” is from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin,
White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; rpt., New York: Grove, 1967), 140.
1. The title of this collection of stories, Dear Science, is borrowed from tv on the Radio,
Dear Science, Interscope, 2008.
2. June Jordan, “Inaugural Rose,” in Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jor­
dan, ed. Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007),
297.
3. I shy away from black science fiction and Afrofuturism and, for the most part — when
addressing science specifically — settle on exploring the ways black creatives engage science
outside these genres. Although this list is a too-­small sample of the expansive work in black
science fiction, black speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism, see Kodwo Eshun, “Further
Considerations of Afrofuturism,” cr: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (Summer 2003):

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 by ongoing research on Sylvia Wynter’s “demonic model,” which she dis-
cusses in her essay “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” and the concepts of
“autopoiesis” and “science of the word,” which she takes up in a number
of her essays. The demonic model, taken from physics, is used by Wynter
to think about the intellectual and conceptual ground through which Ca-
ribbean women recalibrate the meaning of humanity. “Autopoiesis” is a
term developed by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.
It is used by Wynter to show that we invest in our present normative mode
of existence in order to keep the living-­system — our environmental and
existential world — as is. This is a recursive logic; it depicts our presently
ecocidal and genocidal world as normal and unalterable. Our work is to
notice this logic and breach it. Wynter’s extension of Aimé Césaire’s “sci-
ence of the word,” speaks to interdisciplinarity, dislodging our biocentric
system of knowledge, and showing that the natural sciences, the humani-
ties, and the social sciences are, when thought together, generative sites
of inquiry.4 In using concepts such as these — scientific terms that are not
cast as purely and objectively scientific yet retain within them traces of
the hard sciences — Wynter theorizes race outside raciology and positions
blackness and black studies as an analytics of invention. My curiosity led
me to think about the humanizing work black creatives illuminate in their
scientifically creative and creatively scientific artworlds, while also draw-
ing attention to the disruptive work that black feminists and black schol-

387 – 402; André M. Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); and Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimag­
ined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke
University, 2018).
4. Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’
of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’ ” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole
Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), 355 – 372; Syl-
via Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to
Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as
Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 9 – 89. See
also Aimé Césaire, “Poetry and Knowledge,” in Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, trans. Clayton
Eshleman and Annette Smith (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), xlii – lvi.
A biocentric system of knowledge that assumes we are, totally and completely and purely,
biological beings, beholden to evolution and its attendant teleological temporalities, rather
than humans who are physiological-­story-­makers, both bios and mythoi, who produce fic-
tive evolutionary stories about our biological selves. “Biocentric” is defined numerous times
throughout this text, although the explanation in the story “(Zong) Bad Made Measure” is
the most comprehensive.

2  Curiosities (My Heart

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 ars do (as they breach the recursive field of feminist science and technol-
ogy studies and other disciplines).
I share Dear Science not as a project that describes science, particularly
black science, through (or as) scientific racism, but as a study of how we
come to know black life through asymmetrically connected knowledge
systems. Science is present — it is tied to the curiosities noted above — but
it is restless and uncomfortably situated and multifarious rather than de-
finitive and downward-pressing.5 This is a book about black livingness
and ways of knowing. This shift — from studying science to studying ways
of knowing — has allowed me to work out where and how black thinkers
imagine and practice liberation as they are weighed down by what I can
only describe as biocentrically induced accumulation by dispossession.
The weight is important here, because it signals not simply a monumen-
tal system of knowledge that is fueled by colonial and plantocratic logics,
but the weight that bears down on all black people, inside and outside the
academy, and puts pressure on their physiological and psychic and politi-
cal well-­being. Dear Science takes into account how black intellectual life
is tied to corporeal and affective labor (flesh and brains and blood and
bones, hearts, souls) by noticing the physiological work of black libera-
tion. These labors are, however, impossible to track and capture with pre-
cision. In noticing the physiological work of black liberation, I am asking
for a mode of recognition that does not itemize-­commodify black libera-
tion and black embodied knowledge. Indeed, tracking down (quantify-
ing and/or endlessly describing) black corporeal and affective and physi-
ological labor belies the kinds of black studies these stories tell. For this
reason, affective-­physiological-­corporeal-­intellectual labor, within this
text, is momentary and somewhat erratic; I imperfectly draw attention
to how seeking liberation, and reinventing the terms of black life outside
normatively negative conceptions of blackness, is onerous, joyful, and dif-
ficult, yet unmeasured and unmeasurable. Mnemonic black livingness.
My heart makes my head swim.6

5. Dear Science works with scientia (knowledge) in its most general sense. Science (biol-
ogy, math, physics, and so on) animates scientia, but science (testable materials, systematic
methods that result in explanation, experiments and predictions and discoveries) is not the
central preoccupation of Dear Science. Science is a shadow, a story, a friendship. Science re-
veals failed attachments.
6. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 140.

Makes My Head Swim) 3

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 WONDER

Within, I share a series of interdisciplinary stories that are indebted to an-

ticolonial thought and black studies. Dear Science argues that black peo-
ple have always used interdisciplinary methodologies to explain, explore,
and story the world, because thinking and writing and imagining across a
range of texts, disciplines, histories, and genres unsettles suffocating and
dismal and insular racial logics. By employing interdisciplinary method-
ologies and living interdisciplinary worlds, black people bring together
various sources and texts and narratives to challenge racism. Or, black
people bring together various sources and texts and narratives not to cap-
ture something or someone, but to question the analytical work of captur-
ing, and the desire to capture, something or someone. The stories think
through how racism and other forms of oppression underpin the politi-
cal economy of academic and nonacademic disciplinary thinking (the de-
mand to gather and live with seemingly transparent data, in a range of sec-
tors; living with data [policies, reports, cards and carding] that ostensibly
prove that those communities living outside normalcy are verifiably out-
side normalcy; giving over the data in exchange for capital). Within black
studies and anticolonial studies, one can observe an ongoing method of
gathering multifariously textured tales, narratives, fictions, whispers,
songs, grooves. The textures offer one way to challenge the primacy of
evidentiary and insular normalcies, because they are allegedly incongru-
ous. In assembling ideas that are seemingly disconnected and uneven (the
seabird and the epilogue, the song and the soil, the punch clock and the
ecosystem, the streetlight and the kick-­on-­beat), the logic of knowing-­to-­
prove is unsustainable because incongruity appears to be offering atypical
thinking. Yet curiosity thrives. The industry punch clock calibrates and re-
calibrates the ecosystem (water . . . rich in corrosive chemicals purged from
the factories of its industrial past) and . . .7 She asks: What happens when
our blood falls to the soil and seeps in? She wonders: What happens to
our conception of land when it is an absorbent receptacle for black peo-
ple’s erythrocytes, leukocytes, thrombocytes? She answers: Strange fruit.8

7. Malini Ranganathan, “Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an
American Water Tragedy,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 3 (2016): 18.
8. Danyel Haughton, your question still sits with me. See also Katherine McKittrick,
“Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (November 2013): 1 – 15; Billie Holiday, “Strange
Fruit,” Commodore, 1939.

4  Curiosities (My Heart

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 Agony. Also, assembling ideas that are seemingly connected (the weight
and the measure, the cloth and the silk, the road and the vehicle) fuse and
break apart how we know, because we seek out continuities and ruptures.
And curiosity thrives. The weight (pull of gravity) and measure (calcu-
lation) are overlapping and different (uncommon weight/uncommon
weight/new weight . . . water parts) and . . .9 What is meaningful, then,
are the ways in which black people are interdisciplinary actors, continu-
ally entangling and disentangling varying narratives and tempos and hues
that, together, invent and reinvent knowledge. This interdisciplinary in-
novation illuminates, to borrow from Mark V. Campbell, multiple skills
and ways of knowing that privilege collaboration and bring into view un-
orthodox practices of belonging that discredit ethnic absolutism and its at-
tendant geographic fictions.10
This is a way of living, and an analytical frame, that is curious and sus-
tained by wonder (the desire to know). This is a method that demands
openness and is unsatisfied with questions that result in descriptive-­data-­
induced answers. Black studies and anticolonial thought offer method-
ological practices wherein we read, live, hear, groove, create, and write
across a range of temporalities, places, texts, and ideas that build on ex-
isting liberatory practices and pursue ways of living the world that are
uncomfortably generous and provisional and practical and, as well, im-
precise and unrealized.11 The method is rigorous, too. Wonder is study.
Curiosity is attentive. Black method is therefore not continuously and
absolutely undisciplined (invariably without precision, invariably un-
done).12 Black method is precise, detailed, coded, long, and forever. The
practice of bringing together multiple texts, stories, songs, and places in-
volves the difficult work of thinking and learning across many sites, and
thus coming to know, generously, varying and shifting worlds and ideas.

9. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Toronto: Mercury Press, 2008), 55 – 56, 59.

10. Mark V. Campbell, “Everything’s Connected: A Relationality Remix, a Praxis,” C. L. R.
James Journal 20, no. 1 (2014): 97 – 114. See also Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).
11. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” in Fu­
tures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin (New York: Verson,
2017), 225 – 2 40; AbdouMaliq Simone, Improvised Lives (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2019).
12. To be totally undisciplined can perhaps undermine the intellectual labor of black peo-
ple who rigorously and generously share and build and remember stories and lessons that we
collectively utilize as we move through this world. We are not always undone. Our undoing
is practiced, patient, focused.

Makes My Head Swim) 5

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 Sometimes this is awful because we are gathering dense texts and uncom-
fortable ideas that wear us out. Sometimes this is awful because we are
aware we cannot know forever, yet we are committed to the everlasting
effort of figuring out how we might, together, fashion liberation. We have
no time. This rigor is animated by diasporic literacy, VèVè Clark’s won-
derfully useful reading practice that investigates and shows how we al-
ready do, or can, illuminate and connect existing and emerging diasporic
codes and tempos and stories and narratives and themes. Clark shows
how diasporic literacy is structured through “recognized references shar-
ing a wealth of connotations.”13 She theorizes Mayotte Capécia, Maha-
lia Jackson, Jomo Kenyatta, food, furnishings, and laughter as grammars,
figures, and practices that are written into creative-­intellectual texts as
prompts.14 These literacies function to expand the text outside itself (the
prompt opens a door). Kenyatta and laughter are not endlessly explained
and unpacked; instead, they cue what does not need explanation but re-
quires imagination and memory and study. Diasporic literacy signals
ways of being and ways of living (memories, imaginations, mnemonics),
that we know and share in order to collectively struggle against suffocat-
ing racial logics. Like sorrow songs. Like freedom dreams. Like erotic.
Like flying cheek-­bones.15

STORY

The ideas and curiosities gathered in Dear Science are bundled and pre-
sented as stories. Telling, sharing, listening to, and hearing stories are re-
lational and interdisciplinary acts that are animated by all sorts of people,
places, narrative devices, theoretical queries, plots. The process is sus-
tained by invention and wonder. The story has no answers. The stories
offer an aesthetic relationality that relies on the dynamics of creating-­
narrating-­listening-­hearing-­reading-­and-­sometimes-­unhearing. The sto-

13. VèVè Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy: Allusion in Maryse Condé’s Hérémak­
honon,” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and
Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), 308 – 309.
14. Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy,” 308 – 309.
15. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1990); Robin
D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002); Au-
dre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Cross-
ing Press, 1984), 53 – 59; M. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks
(Charlottetown, Canada: Ragweed Press, 1989), 51 – 53.

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 ries do not offer lucid tales or answers; rather, they signal ways of living
in a world that denies black humanity (or, more aptly, the stories signal
ways of black livingness).16 The story-­text itself, read aloud or quietly, is
an imprint of black life and livingness that tells of the wreckage and the
lists and the dance floors and the loss and the love and the rumors and
the lessons and the heartbreak. It prompts. The story does not simply de-
scribe, it demands representation outside itself. Indeed, the story cannot
tell itself without our willingness to imagine what it cannot tell. The story
asks that we live with what cannot be explained and live with unexplained
cues and diasporic literacies, rather than reams of positivist evidence. The
story opens the door to curiosity; the reams of evidence dissipate as we
tell the world differently, with a creative precision. The story asks that we
live with the difficult and frustrating ways of knowing differentially. (And
some things we can keep to ourselves. They cannot have everything. Stop
her autopsy.) They cannot have everything.
I present Dear Science as a series of stories as a way to hold on to the re-
bellious methodological work of sharing ideas in an unkind world. Shar-
ing can be uneasy and terrifying, but our stories of black worlds and black
ways of being can, in part, breach the heavy weight of dispossession and
loss. Our shared stories of black worlds and black ways of being breach the
heavy weight of dispossession and loss because these narratives (songs,
poems, conversations, theories, debates, memories, arts, prompts, curi-
osities) are embedded with all sorts of liberatory clues and resistances
(PFUnk/f.u.n.k.).17 Sharing, therefore, is not understood as an act of
disclosure but instead signals collaboration and collaborative ways to en-
act and engender struggle. As a collection of stories, too, Dear Science un-
derstands theory as a form of storytelling. Stories and storytelling signal
the fictive work of theory. I hope this move, at least momentarily, exposes

16. Barbara Christian writes: “I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intention-
ally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create,
in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, because dynamic rather than fixed ideas
seem more to our liking. How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the
assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity?” Barbara Christian,
“The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 68. See also Saidiya Hart-
man on “critical fabulation,” in “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1 – 1 4.
Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (London: Verson, 2019) is, for
me, a beautiful and creative work that offers a mode of storytelling that captures and bends
disciplined-­i nterdisciplined genres.
17. Listen to Prince, “F.U.N.K.,” NPG Digital, 2007.

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 the intricacies of academic work where fact-­fi nding, experimentation,
analysis, study, are recognized as narrative, plot, tale, and incomplete in-
ventions, rather than impartial treatises. As story, theory is cast as fictive
knowledge and insists that the black imagination is necessary to analyti-
cal curiosity and study. Story is theoretical, dance, poem, sound, song,
geography, affect, photograph, painting, sculpture, and more. Maybe the
story is one way to express and fall in love with black life. Maybe the story
disguises our fall.
Kevin Young offers a rich analysis of black stories, storying, storytell-
ing, and story-­making. He outlines how black stories can be acts of keep-
ing something or someone or somewhere hidden (desire, love, half of the
story, where it’s at, kin). He also addresses how the practice of twisting
stories and narratives (lying, counterfeiting, remapping, recoding, forg-
ing) subverts, refuses, and resists racism.18 Thus, the work of telling and
the story itself enmesh, to offer not a descriptive tale but a strategic lesson
in and for black life. With this in mind: the content of the story is a lesson
(you, we, recode and forge and invent, this is how we live, I will keep your
secret); the act of teaching and telling the story is collaborative (I will
share this with you, coauthor this with you, and live this life with you, I
will tell you my secret); the contents of the story are multifarious and in-
terdisciplinary (characters, plots, twists, metaphors, unexplained codes,
places, secrets, connotations, structure the lesson and telling). The les-
son, the telling, the contents, are ways of life (ways of being). The story,
too, Dina Georgis writes, has the capacity to affectively move us and, at
the same time, incite a listening practice that is “neither disengaged nor
wanting to master what it sees and hears.”19 If the function of the story
is to invite the reader-­v iewer-­interlocutor-­listener to feel, respond, and
be moved, it also, Ruth Wilson Gilmore reminds us, establishes power-
ful alignments (provisional and not) that are put to work with and for
loved ones.20 Gilmore shows how utilizing various narrative devices and
reading across materials (photocopies, pamphlets, newsletters, scrip-
ture, statistics, drawings, announcements, charts, legal documents and
cases, theories) engenders practices of solidarity and collaboration that

18. Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis: Gray-
wolf, 2012).
19. Dina Georgis, The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East (New York: suny
Press, 2013), 1, 18.
20. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Glob­
alizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).

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 work within existing, and imagine new, geographies of liberation.21 The
story, as interdisciplinary method, is thus tasked with immense and
hopeful possibilities. The story is the practice of black life. With and for
love. In this way, and as an interdisciplinary methodology, the story — 
theoretical, creative, groovy, skilled, action-­based, secreted, shared — is a
verb-­activity that invites engagement, curiosity, collaboration.

SIMULTA NEI T Y

Sylvia Wynter writes that we are a “storytelling species,” while also ob-
serving that our stories — especially our origin stories — have an impact
on our neurobiological and physiological behaviors.22 Her observations
draw attention to the natural sciences as well as interdisciplinarity, em-
phasizing a dynamic connection between narrative and biology (stories
have the capacity to move us). In addition to contesting a teleological-­
biocentric genre of the human, the dynamism between biology and nar-
rative affirms the black methodologies noted above: science and story are
not discrete; rather, we know, read, create, and feel science and story si-
multaneously.23 Or, we tell and feel stories (in our hearts), and this telling-­
feeling tells-­feels the empirics of black life. Reading across our curiosities,
the story and imagination are testimonies grounded in the material ex-
pression of black life. The story has physiological components. And sto-
ries make place.24 This means the metaphoric, allegorical, symbolic, and
other devices that shape stories also move us and make place. These nar-
rative devices, so thick and complicated in black studies, demand think-
ing about the interdisciplinary underpinnings of black studies beyond
an additive model.25 Conceptualizing stories and attendant narrative de-

21. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 182, 212 – 2 48.

22. Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of
Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black,’ ” in National Identities and Socio-­
political Changes in Latin America, ed. Mercedes F. Durán-­Cogan and Antonio Gómez-­
Moriana (New York: Routledge, 2001), 30 – 66.
23. “I burst apart.” Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 109.
24. “I hurried back to Eatonville because I knew the town was full of material and that I
could get it without hurt, harm or danger.” Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men (1935; rpt.,
New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 2.
25. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Iden-
tity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991):
1241 – 1 299; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the
Politics of Empowerment (1990; rpt., New York: Routledge, 2000), 18.

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 vices as tied to extraliterary sites (place, body, home, for example) is an
interdisciplinary-­intersectional reading practice that interlaces the mate-
rial and the metaphoric. Here the work of Neil Smith and Cindi Katz is
useful.26 They ask us to think about the ways different kinds and types of
geographic terms — space, location, position, mapping, and so on — a re
often utilized without attending to the politics that underwrite these
terms. Specifically, the material, concrete, and grounded work of physical-­
material space goes missing in some theories that draw on space and spa-
tial concepts. A research statement such as “I am going to map the feelings
of racialized domestic workers and discover their spaces of containment”
clearly demonstrates troubling spatial metaphors that emerge from and
embrace colonial reasoning. Conceptualizing certain geographic terms
in this way also reifies the absoluteness of space and casts it as an empty
container, thus naturalizing uneven geographies and their attendant so-
cial inequities. Leaning heavily on metaphoric concepts risks fixing so-
cial identities in place because it ostensibly puts forth a “floating world
of ideas” that are simply hovering around us.27 This kind of outlook re-
moves social actors from the production of space and other infrastruc-
tures. This is not a call to disregard metaphor but, instead, a plea to take
seriously how metaphors are necessarily illuminating, and are indeed
structured by and through, the complex groundedness of black life — as
extraliterary-­storied-­material-­metaphoric-­i nterdisciplinary-­dynamic-­
curious-­scientifically-­creative (feeling). Rather than disregard metaphor,
we sit with metaphor.
Thinking through the interdisciplinary interplay between narrative
and material worlds is especially useful in black studies, because our ana-
lytical sites, and our selfhood, are often reduced to metaphor, analogy,
trope, and symbol. To borrow from Hortense Spillers, black people are, in
many instances, conceived through “mythical prepossession.”28 What hap-
pens when we, black people, are read or analyzed as pure metaphor? And
what kind of metaphors are we? I suspect, in some cases, we are metaphor-

26. Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, “Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics,”
in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (New York: Routledge,
1993), 67 – 83.
27. Smith and Katz, “Grounding Metaphor,” 80.
28. Rhetorical wealth, telegraphic coding, overdetermined normative properties.
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black,
White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2003), 203.

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 ically unliving. In terms of geography, our sense of place is often precon-
ceptualized as dead and dying and this lifelessness extends outward, from
that death and deadliness, toward extinction.29 The dead spaces are inex-
tricably linked to the dehumanizing scripts — they require one another:
one cannot have (and dispose of) the welfare queen without (loathing and
pushing her out of) the objectionable infrastructures that surround her.
At the same time, black geographies are often described through meta-
phor: postslave black geographies are described as fugitive, underground,
maroon; past-­present black geographies are described as nonexistent,
margin, tomb, womb, aquatic, hidden, zones-­of-­nonbeing. Often (not al-
ways!) these metaphors are delinked from their material underpinnings or
histories, which means racial violence risks being cast and/or read as figu-
rative (the geographic idea is abstracted from its material and experiential
and embodied underpinnings: the escape is abstracted from the material
and intellectual conditions that incited each different form of flight when
the past flight equals [exactly anticipates] present escape). Particularly
sinister are the redoubled workings of death and/as metaphor — which
destroys all we are and annihilates our sense of place. This is precisely
why paying close attention to the materiality of the black story matters.
We cannot politicize ourselves collectively unless we address how the
racist trope and absolute space are corelatedly working against black life.
Part of our intellectual task is, then, to perhaps get in touch with the ma-
teriality of our analytical worlds. Part of our task is to read carefully and,
when necessary, reckon with materiality of metaphor.30 It is worth repeat-
ing, then, that this is not a request to abandon metaphors. We need meta-
phors! Metaphors offer an (entwined material and imagined) future that
has not arrived and the future we live and have already lived through.31

29. Katherine McKittrick, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place,” Journal
of Social and Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (2011): 947 – 963.
30. We cannot risk exclusively and solely relying on metaphors or analogies or symbols
as literary devices that advance our argument about blackness. We cannot drop blackness
into the realm of motif, and depart, disguising the difficult and complicated and extraliter-
ary worlds that animate and are relational to black life.
31. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Strug­
gle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 16 – 19; Tanya Titchkosky, “Life
with Dead Metaphors: Impairment Rhetoric in Social Justice Praxis,” Journal of Literary and
Cultural Disability Studies 9, no. 1 (2015): 1 – 18. Read, too, Toni Morrison on metaphor in her
“Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks,” from Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1990), 62 – 91.

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 Metaphors are “observational scaffolding.”32 Metaphors function to rad-
ically map existing useable (entwined material and imagined) sites of
struggle and liberation and joy! Metaphors move us. Metaphors are not
just metaphoric, though. They are concretized. This means — i f we be-
lieve the stories we tell and share — t hat the metaphoric devices we use
to think through black life are signaling practices of liberation (tangible,
theoretical, imaginary) that are otherwise-­possible and already here (and
over there).

COLLAPSE

The task is, I believe, to get in touch with the materiality of our analyti-
cal worlds, draw attention to how black studies thinks across a range of
places, times, genres, texts, shadows, grooves that are punctuated with
diasporic literacy, and collectively think-­k now-­l ive black life as curious,
studied, and grounded. The analytics, as story, allows us to learn and
share, and get in touch, without knowing totally. Thus, as we grieve long-­
standing racial violences, as we are punched by memories of those we
have lost, as we archive the most brutal of punishments, as we are weighed
down by losing her, them, over and over and we know her and we do not
know her and we did not know their name until it happened (we did not
know his name until he was gone, I did not know his name, I cannot know,
I found the name, I came across her after she was gone) and we feel heart-
break and we see it again and again, as we study the severity of plantation
temporalities (then-­now), as we are weighed down, and the loss is there
beside us, as we grieve and collapse, we do not know absolutely. Still. Los-
ing her. Dear Science seeks to tell and live and generate an ethical distance.
I hope to write an ethical distance while recognizing that our collective
histories of racial violence put pressure on how we live, now.33 I found her
picture. I hope to write an ethical distance and grieve what I, we, can-
not know without industry-­of-­objecthood enveloping her. I kept your
secret.

32. Teju Cole, “Double Negative,” in Known and Strange Things (New York: Random
House, 2016), 71.
33. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2015); Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging
(Toronto: Vintage, 2002).

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 FORM

In Dear Science, I write and study stories about algorithms, lists, science,
footnotes (references, citations), plantations, consciousness, grooves and
beats, poetry, geography, methodology, and theory. The stories are inter-
disciplinary narratives that use and amend the academic form to wade
through complexities of black intellectual life. This project shares what
I have learned from friends, colleagues, students, musicians, writers, and
poets, and it also includes some photos of texts, images, stories, and songs
that have helped me work out what I have and have not learned. This
book is very much indebted to the writings of Édouard Glissant and Syl-
via Wynter — t wo very different thinkers who have inspired me (many
of us) to keep reading and sharing and wondering. The stories are con-
nected but can be read in any order. These are stories about black life. The
stories begin from the premise that liberation is an already existing and
unfinished and unmet possibility, laced with creative labor, that emerges
from the ongoing collaborative expression of black humanity and black
livingness.

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