Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race

Geologic Life by Kathryn Yusoff explores the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically, highlighting how Western and Enlightenment thought perpetuates anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Brown environmental and racial injustices. She argues that the disciplines of geology and geography established and perpetuated colonial practices that ordered the world and people along a racial axis, creating an apartheid of materiality as distinct geospatial forms. 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.

Format: Hardback
Length: 608 pages
Publication date: 10 May 2024
Publisher: Duke University Press

Geologic Life by Kathryn Yusoff explores the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. She examines the history of geology as a discipline and ongoing mineral and resource extraction, highlighting how Western and Enlightenment thought embeds imperial geology and perpetuates anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Brown environmental and racial injustices. Yusoff outlines how the disciplines of geology and geography established and perpetuated colonial practices that ordered the world and people along a racial axis. She also explores the conceptualization of the inhuman as political, geophysical, and paleontological, unearthing an apartheid of materiality as distinct geospatial forms. 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 ongoing geotrauma in colonial afterlives, Yusoff demonstrates that race is as much a geological formation as a biological one.

Weight: 1089g
Dimension: 229 x 152 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781478026075