Dear Science and Other Stories

Abstract

Taking interdisciplinary curiosity as methodological guide, Katherine McKittrick’s rhizomatic Dear Science and Other Stories explores how Black “creatives”—scholars, writers, musicians, data scientists, geographers—engage science through storytelling to glimpse Black livingness and liberation. Instead of focusing on depictions of scientific racism and biological determinism, McKittrick presents Black stories, which she describes as “scientifically creative and creatively scientific artworlds” (2). These stories demonstrate “how we come to know black life through asymmetrically connected knowledge systems” and “imagine and practice liberation” despite being weighed down by biocentric violence (3). At its heart, Dear Science reorients Black studies toward Black life and argues for an alternative science from a Black sense of place. McKittrick utilizes the story form because it “prompts” imaginative departure and “asks that we live with the difficult and frustrating ways of knowing differentially” (7). In other words, because stories foment curiosity about what is in and outside of the story itself, McKittrick uses the form to train readers in diasporic literacy—a way of knowing Black life that abandons the need for “reams of positivist evidence” of biocentric violation (7). As an alternative, she hypothesizes: “Maybe the story is one way to express and fall in love with black life. Maybe the story disguises our fall” (8). Storytelling finds a challenging pleasure in blackness and offers cover for the periodic stumbling on the path to understanding. This conceptualization of the story form as a useful academic mode for imagining Black life’s dynamism is one of McKittrick’s major contributions. Dear Science’s 10 stories and 7 images can be read on their own or in any order. As demonstrated in the contents’ titles, Dear Science’s themes suggestively overlap like a Venn diagram. Despite resembling academic chapters in tone, McKittrick’s insistence in calling her sections “stories” suggests that the value of her insights lies in the thoughts they spark for readers. These simultaneously tangential and consequential thoughts enable readers to build imaginative worlds from which to contemplate Black life. The first five stories exemplify McKittrick’s theorizing. In the first story, McKittrick explores Black studies citational practices (endnotes, footnotes, references, bibliographies, parentheses, etc.). She theorizes these practices as ways of knowing that enable Black people to “unknow ourselves” and share, not what we know, but “how we know ... imperfect and sometimes unintelligible but always hopeful and practical ways to live this world as black” (16, 17). She argues that effortful sharing-through-citation “reorganizes our knowledge worlds by providing textual and methodological (verbal, nonverbal, written, unwritten) confirmations of black life as struggle” (27). By promoting diasporic