Geologic Life

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London and author of A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None.

“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) "Yusoff’s book, in drawing out the geologic foundation of colonial modernity in an intricate yet incisive way, is a watershed, demanding a rethinking of many familiar concepts in the humanities. Indeed, despite its originality, I am struck by Yusoff’s intellectual generosity and breadth. Geologic Life ranges across the humanities and social sciences, combining the insights of some of the most important intellectual movements of the current moment... as well as demonstrating the power of artists and writers, from Dionne Brand to Natalie Diaz, in resisting geopower." - Joe Davidson (H-Environment)

• Introduction. Coordinates (0°0' Longitude, 51°N Latitude)  1Geologic Life Analytic  27Geologic Life Lexicon  31I. Geology’s Margins1. Insurgent Geology and Fugitive Life  392. Rift Theory  773. Underground Aesthetics  97II. Geologic Histories and Theories4. “Fathering” Geology  1215. Geologic Grammars  1936. Stratigraphic Thought and the Metaphysics of the Strata  2367. Geopower: Materialisms before Biopolitics  255III. Inhuman Epistemologies8. Inhuman Matters I: Black Earth and Abyssal Futurity  2959. Inhuman Matter II: Deep Timing and Undergrounding in the Carceral Mine  34310. Inhuman Matters III: Stealing Suns  37811. Inhuman Matters IV: Modernity, Urbanism, and the Spatial Fix of Whiteness  40112. Inhuman Matters V: Trees of Life (and Death), “Strange Fruit,” and Geologies of Race  438IV. Paradigms of Geologic Life13. Ghost Geology  477Acknowledgments  497Notes  501References  559Index  583