Here’s a list of terms and themes I think McKittrick works with throughout the book:
Transparent space vs. opaque space (contesting space as just “is”)
Three-dimensionality of space
Materiality and its scales
Racial-sexual displacement
Diaspora across space and time
Ungeographic bodies and geographic domination
How does difference become naturalized? Showing, making visible that process
The demonic … demonic grounds
Deep space (Smith)
Poetics of landscape (Glissant)
The color-line (DeBois)
New ethnicities, the essential black subjectivity (Hall)
Site of memory (Morrison)
Black absented presence
Re-placing
In order to really work with and address these concepts and themes, McKittrick weaves together several different genres and analytics. She theorizes slave auction blocks, maps of old plantations, the space of Harriet Jacobs attic, and engages with Sylvia Winter’s work.