Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race

by Kathryn Yusoff

Overview

In Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff theorizes the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Examining both the history of geology as a discipline and ongoing mineral and resource extraction, Yusoff locates forms of imperial geology embedded in Western and Enlightenment thought and highlights how it creates anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Brown environmental and racial injustices. Throughout, she outlines how the disciplines of geology and geography—and their conventions: surveying, identifying, classifying, valuing, and extracting—established and perpetuated colonial practices that ordered the world and people along a racial axis. Examining the conceptualization of the inhuman as political, geophysical, and paleontological, Yusoff unearths an apartheid of materiality as distinct geospatial forms. This colonial practice of geology organized and underpinned racialized accounts of space and time in ways that materially made Anthropocene Earth. At the same time, Yusoff turns to Caribbean, Indigenous, and Black thought to chart a parallel geologic epistemology of the "earth-bound" that challenges what and who the humanities have chosen to overlook in its stories of the earth. By reconsidering the material epistemologies of the earth as an on-going geotrauma in colonial afterlives, Yusoff demonstrates that race is as much a geological formation as a biological one.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478059288
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	03/18/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	560
File size:	51 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London and author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Coordinates (0°0' Longitude, 51°N Latitude)  1
Geologic Life Analytic  27
Geologic Life Lexicon  31
I. Geology’s Margins
1. Insurgent Geology and Fugitive Life  39
2. Rift Theory  77
3. Underground Aesthetics  97
II. Geologic Histories and Theories
4. “Fathering” Geology  121
5. Geologic Grammars  193
6. Stratigraphic Thought and the Metaphysics of the Strata  236
7. Geopower: Materialisms before Biopolitics  255
III. Inhuman Epistemologies
8. Inhuman Matters I: Black Earth and Abyssal Futurity  295
9. Inhuman Matter II: Deep Timing and Undergrounding in the Carceral Mine  343
10. Inhuman Matters III: Stealing Suns  378
11. Inhuman Matters IV: Modernity, Urbanism, and the Spatial Fix of Whiteness  401
12. Inhuman Matters V: Trees of Life (and Death), “Strange Fruit,” and Geologies of Race  438
IV. Paradigms of Geologic Life
13. Ghost Geology  477
Acknowledgments  497
Notes  501
References  559
Index  583

Editorial Reviews

Destined to be as influential as Kathryn Yusoff's masterful first book, Geologic Life thinks with geopower and geontopower in order to open rifts in the racist matrixes of time that divide and rank existence and to energize efforts seeking a more porous, less fungible encounter with subjectivity. As Yusoff sinks into the archives that compose the history of white geology, she lifts into view a multitude of missing earths—Indigenous, Black, and Brown earths—visible in seams of geologic ledgers. We must read Yusoff to see what is in front of our blinded eyes.”—Elizabeth A. Povinelli, author of, Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism

“This is a groundbreaking book of anticolonial praxis that brilliantly excavates the long racialized history of white geology as well as the ghost geologies that are critical foundations to our current and historical practices of extraction.”—Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey, author of, Allegories of the Anthropocene

"Yusoff’s book, in drawing out the geologic foundation of colonial modernity in an intricate yet incisive way, is a watershed, demanding a rethinking of many familiar concepts in the humanities. Indeed, despite its originality, I am struck by Yusoff’s intellectual generosity and breadth. Geologic Life ranges across the humanities and social sciences, combining the insights of some of the most important intellectual movements of the current moment... as well as demonstrating the power of artists and writers, from Dionne Brand to Natalie Diaz, in resisting geopower."—Joe Davidson, H-Environment

"An expansive history of geology that fuses philosophy, aesthetics, Black critical studies, and grim forensics. ... The scope of Geologic Life is vertiginous: the mathematical formulas, (often painful) archival accounts of dehumanization, and analyses of contemporary art woven into the book contribute to this expansiveness."—Eyad Houssami, Critical Inquiry

From the Publisher

Destined to be as influential as Kathryn Yusoff's masterful first book, Geologic Life thinks with geopower and geontopower in order to open rifts in the racist matrixes of time that divide and rank existence and to energize efforts seeking a more porous, less fungible encounter with subjectivity. As Yusoff sinks into the archives that compose the history of white geology, she lifts into view a multitude of missing earths—Indigenous, Black, and Brown earths—visible in seams of geologic ledgers. We must read Yusoff to see what is in front of our blinded eyes.

Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism - Elizabeth A. Povinelli

"Yusoff’s book, in drawing out the geologic foundation of colonial modernity in an intricate yet incisive way, is a watershed, demanding a rethinking of many familiar concepts in the humanities. Indeed, despite its originality, I am struck by Yusoff’s intellectual generosity and breadth. Geologic Life ranges across the humanities and social sciences, combining the insights of some of the most important intellectual movements of the current moment... as well as demonstrating the power of artists and writers, from Dionne Brand to Natalie Diaz, in resisting geopower."

H-Environment - Joe Davidson

This is a groundbreaking book of anticolonial praxis that brilliantly excavates the long racialized history of white geology as well as the ghost geologies that are critical foundations to our current and historical practices of extraction.

Allegories of the Anthropocene - Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey