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Article

Abstract

[First paragraph]

When the protagonist of M. NourbeSe Philip's novella Looking for Livingstone: An Odyssey of Silence (1991) resolutely declares that she will "open a way to the interior or perish," (7) she is at once reappropriating a colonial expression of geographic domination while enacting a "demonic" respatialization of African cultural representation. The statement, taken originally from Scottish missionary and explorer Dr. David Livingstone's travel diary, (re)presents the colonial metaphor of Africa as the unknown "dark continent" and its embedded representation of the eroticized black female body. This "opening of the interior," a central motif of Philip's text, thus announces the united geographic and sexual violence of colonial imperialism, but it also articulates a transgressive space of resistance—the protagonist's nomadic odyssey across time and space, undertaken without maps or guides, displaces the linear geographic "truths" of colonial exploration with a demonic spatiality. Feminist human geographer Katherine McKittrick utilizes the concept of the "demonic" in her groundbreaking critical text Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006) as a means of "rethink[ing] the complex linkages between history, blackness, race, and place" (143). The term "demonic," appropriated by McKittrick from Caribbean cultural critic Sylvia Wynter, demarcates sites of productive geographic and subjective alterity, oppositional spaces and places for black geographies that are rendered invisible by traditional geographic epistemologies [3]. Demonic grounds thus provide "a very different geography; one which is genealogically wrapped up in the historical spatial unrepresentability of black femininity and ... one that thinks about the ways in which black women necessarily contribute to a re-presentation of human geography" (xxv-xxvi). The "demonic" as a spatial schema thus (re)presents the historically "unrepresentable" black female body by uniting the geographical and sexual concerns of spatial allocation, for it exposes the dichotomous relationship between "geographies of domination" and systemic attempts to control and exploit the reproductive capacities of women, particularly black women (McKittrick x).

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