E-grāmata: Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race

"Geologic Life provides a magisterial account of the specific processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Building on the core idea first explored in her breakout short book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None--that race is as much a geological formation as a biological one--Kathryn Yusoff develops a spatial account of racialization based on rifts and plateaus, what she calls "the stratigraphic imagination"; that structured Enlightenment thought and its colonial conceptions of the world. The book provides a deep and detailed reconsideration of core figures (Louis Agassiz, James Hutton, Georges Cuvier, and others) from the emergence of Enlightenment and colonial sciences in the 17th-20th centuries to show how colonial geology (as theclassification of the origins of earth and beings) organized, and continues to underpin, racialized accounts of space and time"--

Kathryn Yusoff examines the history of geology as a discipline to theorize how race and racialization emerged from Western production of geologic knowledge.

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.