Geologic Life:Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race

by: Kathryn Yusoff (Author)

Publisher: Duke University Press Books

Publication Date: 3 May 2024

Language: English

Print Length: 560 pages

ISBN-10: 1478030305

ISBN-13: 9781478030300

Book Description

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 Weste 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 tus 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.
Review “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
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.