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.
- Cover
- Contents
- Introduction. Coordinates (0°0′ Longitude, 51° N Latitude)
- Geologic Life Analytic
- Geologic Life Lexicon
- I: Geology’s Margins
- 1. Insurgent Geology and Fugitive Life
- 2. Rift Theory
- 3. Underground Aesthetics
- II: Geologic Histories and Theories
- 4. “Fathering”Geology
- 5. Geologic Grammars
- 6. Stratigraphic Thought and the Metaphysics of the Strata
- 7. Geopower: Materialisms before Biopolitics
- III: Inhuman Epistemologies
- 8. Inhuman Matters I: Black Earth and Abyssal Futurity
- 9. Inhuman Matters II: Deep Timing and Undergrounding in the Carceral Mine
- 10. Inhuman Matters III: Stealing Suns
- 11. Inhuman Matters IV: Modernity, Urbanism, and the Spatial Fix of Whiteness
- 12. Inhuman Matters V: Trees of Life (and Death),“ Strange Fruit,” and Geologies of Race
- IV: Paradigms of Geologic Life
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- References
- Index
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