A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Rethinking Geology, Race, and Colonialism in the Anthropocene
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of Minnesota Press
Published:2nd Nov '18
Should be back in stock very soon
This insightful work delves into the intersection of race, geology, and colonialism, presenting a critical analysis in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.
In A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, Kathryn Yusoff challenges the conventional narratives surrounding the Anthropocene, asserting that no geology is neutral. She explores how the foundational grammar of geology has been instrumental in shaping extractive economies, particularly in the contexts of colonialism and slavery. By tracing the intersections of race and geological discourse, Yusoff highlights the often overlooked connections between the exploitation of land and the lives of marginalized communities.
The book initiates a vital transdisciplinary dialogue that weaves together feminist black theory, geography, and earth sciences. Yusoff's work addresses the politics of the Anthropocene, emphasizing how race, materiality, and the concept of deep time influence our understanding of geological histories. Through this lens, she invites readers to reconsider the legacies of geology and its implications for contemporary society, urging a reevaluation of how we perceive the earth and its resources.
Forerunners serves as a platform for innovative ideas, bridging the gap between nascent thoughts and polished academic works. This collection represents a space for dynamic intellectual exchange, where the boundaries of scholarship are pushed, and new perspectives emerge. Yusoff’s exploration within A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None is not just an academic endeavor; it is a call to action for rethinking the narratives that shape our world.
"A historically grounded and embodied understanding of geological transformation."—Antipode
"A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None could be summed up as a new history of the relationship between geology and subjectivity. This is by no means a novel concern – pre-black conscious writers such as WEB du Bois, black conscious writers including Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko, and their contemporaries and successors, for example Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe and Kathrine McKittrick, have all grappled with the complex human-citizenship-land question. What makes Kathryn Yusoff’s book different is that it addresses these questions via contemporary concerns about the Anthropocene, the name given to the new geological epoch. Unlike previous epochs, such as the Pleistocene, which was marked by climatological planetary impacts – in this case repeated glaciations, which is why it’s also called the Ice Age – the Anthropocene is marked by human interference."—New Frame
"Black studies scholars and geographers interested in the environment and materiality alike are likely to find the text useful in asserting that a grammar of biopolitics cannot adequately account for the social history and present of Black people’s proximity to death, from the silver mines of sixteenth-century Potosí to the toxic environs of late-capitalist US urbanity."—ISLE
"In steering away from specific dates, Yusoff engages with concepts of geologic time by connecting struggles for equity and justice with some of the foundational epistemologies that are normally used to connect historical and physical geology: uniformitarianism, the vastness of time, and the trade of time for location."—Nature Geoscience
"Yusoff’s Billion Black Anthropocenes calls to mind this multitude of examples of colonialism and attendant resource exploitation, reminding us that the Anthropocene is simply the latest in a centuries-long string of world destructions enacted by western colonizers."—Inhabiting the Anthropocene
"Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None charts and unearths the grammar of geology as one that is foundational to and enabling of the extractive economies and histories of colonialism and slavery."—Eye on Design
ISBN: 9781517907532
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
130 pages