Where
I am Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Gender Studies and Black Studies units at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. I research, write, and teach in the areas of black studies, cultural geographies, and the arts. I also study the writings of Sylvia Wynter. I am currently thinking and writing across three entwined registers: black methodologies, creative works, and practices of liberation; black and black feminist geographies; aesthetic traces that emerge alongside bookmaking, theory making, and cymatics. Each of these registers are complemented by and through solidarities and collaborations that bring into focus freedom-making, co-operation and diaspora.
Selected Writings
My writing includes the books,Demonic Grounds and Dear Science, as well as the edited collections, Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis and, with Clyde Woods,Black Geographies and the Politics of Place. My articles, essays, and other works attend to the gendered, racial and geographic processes that underwrite the plantation, the prison, music and music making, anti-colonial methods, and the unconventional artworlds of black creatives.
Most of my essays can be accessed for free here and are also collected in Heartbreak and Other Geographies, edited by Brittany Meché and Camilla Hawthorne. My new and fortcoming projects include the collections Yarns, Ten Essays on Walter Benjamin, and the essay “Insects, Amber, Agony and Rest.”
Conversations
Some of my favourite conversations and interviews are:
A conversation on Dear Science with all the cools, published in Society and Space.
On Demonic Grounds and Black Canada with Moriah and McKittrick in WSQ.
Ryan Clarke and McKittrick on black geographies and sonic spaces for Dweller.
Timothy Yannick Hunter and McKittrick on his solo exhibition at Cooper Cole in The New Inquiry.
Drabinksi and McKittrick on black studies and interdisciplinarity for the Black Studies Podcast.
On Dilla Time with Dan Charnas and McKittrick published by Antipode.
Concertinas
For the last few years, I have researching books, bookmaking, bibliography studies, and the form and aesthetics of essays. I have been working with designer and photographer Cristian Ordóñez on a set of bookmaking projects that focus on tactility and anti-colonial narratives. Across these projects we have thought about how form, font, margins, binding, paper weight, and texture can remake or complement academic narratives by fusing the scholarly and the creative. At the same time, the project centres reading and reading practices; I have been speculating about when, if, how, why unconventionally designed scholarly essays, spacing and font decisions, textured pages, knitted spines, invite unexpected entryways into essays that focus on anti- colonialism. For this project, Concertinas, we have made the following box sets and books:
Installation
In Spring 2025, a collective of artists, scholars, poets, curators, designers, creatives, and photographers launched A Smile Split by the Stars, an installation that worked with and through nourbeSe philip’s stunning poem, “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheekbones.”
Designed by Cristian Ordóñez and exhibited at Gallery 44 in Toronto, Canada (spring 2025), and Modern Fuel in Kingston, Canada (autumn 2025) the A Smile Split by the Stars installation reproduced a large-scale vinyl version of philip’s poem, hundreds of 12” x 18” removable posters that were printed with slivers and excerpts from the poem, two framed photo-slides from philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks archives, a continuous analogue slide show of selected archival papers from philip’s private collection, and a looped audio track of samples, one-shots, riffs, beats, and that were mashed up with five creatives reading “Meditations,” together and alone (nourbeSe philip, Trish Salah, Cora Gilroy-Ware, Chloe Savoie-Bernard, Otoniya J. Okot-Bitek). This exhibit also included a custom plinth upon which a handmade book, A Smile Split by the Stars, was exhibited; the book contained an essay by McKittrick and an index by Yaniya Lee and nourbeSe philip.
Below are some images of the project; a more fulsome story can be viewed and heard here. All photos below are by Darren Rigo.
Revolutionary Demand For Happiness
The Revolutionary Demand for Happiness is a working group of graduate students, faculty, and creatives who are interested in exploring the connections between cultural production and liberation. We share ideas about creative works, poetics, black studies, and anti-colonial studies; we seek out ways to momentarily concretize, in place, these ideas through small-scale aesthetic projects such as cooperative reading and writing projects, studio visits, book and art exhibits, music installations, and invited collaborations. You can check out who we are and some of our cool activities and findings at revolutionarydemandforhappiness.com.