The Geographies of Blackness and Anti-Blackness: An Interview with Katherine McKittrick

Abstract

I was born outside of Toronto, Ontario, and grew up in small Ontario towns—on Georgian Bay and near the Grand River and in and around the borders of the Niagara Escarpment. It wasn't until I moved to Toronto that I came to read these places as black. This is to say that while most of the areas and regions I grew up in were predominantly demographically white—I often proclaim that Michael Jackson and Prince brought black to me, musically, while I lived these places—when I began to study black diaspora cultures I realized that these very locations were also inflected with all sorts of mean­ ingful racialized archives: Negro Creek Road, the Sheffield Museum, the black slaves owned by Mohawk leader Joseph Brant/Thayendanegea. This was coupled with ongoing, but often unacknowledged, racialized labour: the migrant workers, mostly Jamaican men at the time I lived in these re­ gions, who fueled the local economies. So my biographical story has always been one that is in tension with blacklessness—a blacklessness that is and was always black, of course. My intellectual narratives emerge from these kinds of tensions. I have always been interested in the ways in which narra­ tives of the past—fictional, archival, historical, poetic, musical—emerge in,