Demonic Grounds

The field-defining text for black geographies-now with a new foreword and afterword

The initial publication of Demonic Grounds in 2006 marked a watershed for the field of geography: revealing how human geographies are a result of racialized connections and black placemaking practices, this book opened the discipline to feminist, interdisciplinary, and black perspectives. Katherine McKittrick traces the geographies of black women across the diaspora, arguing that the spaces they inhabit are marked by legacies of violence and slavery while also being sites of unacknowledged political power. Making a forceful claim, she identifies rich opportunities within black geographies for social and cultural change and rebellion. With a new foreword by Simone Browne and comments from Sylvia Wynter on the original edition as an afterword, this twentieth-anniversary edition celebrates Demonic Grounds and its ongoing influence on twenty-first century geography.

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Author Biography

Katherine McKittrick is professor of gender studies and Canada Research Chair in Black Studies at Queen’s University. She is author of Dear Science and Other Stories and Heartbreak and Other Geographies, edited by Brittany Meche and Camilla Hawthorne (Minnesota, 2026). She is editor of Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis and coeditor, with Clyde Woods, of Black Geographies and the Politics of Place.

Simone Browne is associate professor of African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.

Sylvia Wynter is professor emerita in Afro-American studies and Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University. She is author of the novel Hills of Hebron; several plays, including Maskerade; and many groundbreaking essays, articles, and commentaries that focus on and enact anticolonial praxes.