Forerunners: Ideas First from the University of Minnesota

Press
Original e-works to spark new scholarship
FORERUNNERS: IDEAS FIRST is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works.
Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work
initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the
synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking,
change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

Clare Birchall
Shareveillance: The Dangers of Openly Sharing and Covertly Collecting Data

Ian Bogost
The Geek’s Chihuahua: Living with Apple

William E. Connolly
Aspirational Fascism: The Struggle for Multifaceted Democracy under Trumpism

Andrew Culp
Dark Deleuze

Sohail Daulatzai
Fifty Years of “The Battle of Algiers”: Past as Prologue

Grant Farred
Martin Heidegger Saved My Life

David Golumbia
The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-Wing Extremism

Gary Hall
The Uberfication of the University

John Hartigan Jr.

Aesop’s Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach

Mark Jarzombek
Digital Stockholm Syndrome in the Post-Ontological Age
Nicholas A. Knouf
How Noise Matters to Finance

la paperson
A Third University Is Possible

Akira Mizuta Lippit

Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift

P. David Marshall
The Celebrity Persona Pandemic

Reinhold Martin
Mediators: Aesthetics, Politics, and the City

Shannon Mattern
Deep Mapping the Media City

Ginger Nolan
The Neocolonialism of the Global Village

Kelly Oliver
Carceral Humanitarianism: Logics of Refugee Detention

Davide Panagia
Ten Theses for an Aesthetics of Politics

Jussi Parikka
The Anthrobscene

Robert Rosenberger
Callous Objects: Designs against the Homeless

Chuck Rybak
UW Struggle: When a State Attacks Its University

Kenneth J. Saltman
The Swindle of Innovative Educational Finance

Steven Shaviro
No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism

Sharon Sliwinski
Mandela’s Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming

Kathryn Yusoff
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
Joanna Zylinska
The End of Man: A Feminist Counterapocalypse
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or
None

Kathryn Yusoff

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis
“Coal” copyright 1968, 1970, 1973 by Audre Lorde. Copyright 1997 by The Audre Lorde Estate, from
The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde. Used by permission of W. W. Norton &
Company, Inc.

Copyright 2018 by Kathryn Yusoff

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
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The problem was gravity and the answer was gravity
—DIONNE BRAND, Love Enough

Thought of the Other is the moral generosity disposing me to

accept the principle of alterity, to conceive of the world as not
simple and straightforward, with only one truth—mine. But thought
of the Other can dwell within me, without making me alter course,
without “prizing me open,” without changing me within myself. An
ethical principle, it is enough that I not violate it.
The other of Thought is precisely this altering. Then I have to
act . . . I change, and I exchange. This is an aesthetics of turbulence
whose corresponding ethics is not provided in advance.
—ÉDOUARD GLISSANT, Poetics of Relation
 Contents
Preface

Geology, Race, and Matter

Golden Spikes and Dubious Origins
The Inhumanities
Insurgent Geology: A Billion Black Anthropocenes Now
Writing a Geology for the Storm Next Time
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
 Preface

This work started as a redress to the White Geology of the Anthropocene and
found the guts of its mattering in the critical black feminist work of Sadiya
Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection and the alluvial subjectivity of the
Martinique poets Aimé Césaire and Édouard Glissant. Hanging out in the
interdisciplinary spaces opened and sustained by these works, many other
feminist black scholars have been crucial to the approaches developed in this
book. While unable to give this work its full due here, I am particularly
grateful for the courageous analytical and politically poetic work of N. K.
Jemisin’s bringing together of race and geology across the rifts of broken
earths, Sylvia Wynter’s metamorphosis of a black biopolitics, Tina Campt’s
quiet futurity of images, Hortense Spillers’s grammars of dissent, Katherine
McKittrick’s commitment to liberatory black geographies, Denise Ferreira da
Silva’s location of the foundational inscriptions of race in global geography,
Tiffany King’s ecologies, Michelle Wright’s challenge to linear time-space,
Elizabeth Povinelli’s indigenous analytics that refuse redemption, Angela
Last’s critical Caribbean geopolitics, Christina Sharpe’s atmospheres, and
Fred Moten’s writing in the blur. Through the completion of this work, it was
Dionne Brand’s writing that kept me company at 2:00 A.M. Her poetic
relation, given without the possibility of resettling, insists that you must stay
with and in the displacement. In that poetics, in its most material geographies,
I found the new languages and structures of thought that a turn of epoch, the
end of the world of Empire, seems to require. If there is what Brand (2001)
calls a Ruttier—an oral poem that functioned as a map for sailors—recited
throughout this text, its diasporic yearnings are listing toward the possibility
of a gravity that defies antiblackness (in all its guises, across the black and
brown commons forged in the afterlives of invasion, genocide, slavery, and
settler colonialism). It is from Brand that I take an understanding of
Blackness as a material vector that opens out new geographies of space and
time that make fierce departures from the subjugating cuts in geography
exorcised by imperial conditions. Blackness is understood as a state of
relation (in Glissant’s sense of the word) that is assigned to difference
through a material colonial inscription, which simultaneously enacted the
cutting of geographical ties to land and attachments to ecologies. These
diasporic subjects that are summoned here are the ghosts of geology’s
epistemic and material modes of categorization and dispossession, which sit
“beside the earth’s own coiled velocities, its meteoric elegance” (Brand 2006,
100).
Another way to conceive this would be to understand Blackness as a
historically constituted and intentionally enacted deformation in the
formation of subjectivity, a deformation that presses an inhuman
categorization and the inhuman earth into intimacy. This contact point of
geographical proximity with the earth was constructed specifically as a node
of extraction of properties and personhood. At the same time, this forced
intimacy with the inhuman was repurposed for survival and formed into a
praxis for remaking other selves that were built in the harshest of conditions.
The proximity of black and brown bodies to harm in this intimacy with the
inhuman is what I am calling Black Anthropocenes. It is an inhuman
proximity organized by historical geographies of extraction, grammars of
geology, imperial global geographies, and contemporary environmental
racism. It is predicated on the presumed absorbent qualities of black and
brown bodies to take up the body burdens of exposure to toxicities and to
buffer the violence of the earth. Literally stretching black and brown bodies
across the seismic fault lines of the earth, Black Anthropocenes subtend
White Geology as a material stratum.
While genocide (and ongoing settler colonialism) and slavery (and its
afterlives) are by no means historically or culturally assimilate, as they have
different critical discourses, not to mention territorial implications, that are
put into contact through the legacy of White Geology and its geographical
and subjective dispossession. This White Geology continues to propagate
imaginaries that organize Blackness as a stratum or seismic barrier to the
costs of extraction, across the coal face, the alluvial planes, and the sugarcane
fields, and on the slave block, into the black communities that buffer the
petrochemical industries and hurricanes to the indigenous reservations that
soak up the waste of industrialization and the sociosexual effects of
extraction cultures. If the Anthropocene proclaims a sudden concern with the
exposures of environmental harm to white liberal communities, it does so in
the wake of histories in which these harms have been knowingly exported to
black and brown communities under the rubric of civilization, progress,
modernization, and capitalism. The Anthropocene might seem to offer a
dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and
ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they
have been in existence. The Anthropocene as a politically infused geology
and scientific/popular discourse is just now noticing the extinction it has
chosen to continually overlook in the making of its modernity and freedom.
In the context of this selective perspectivism, Black Anthropocenes marks
an interjection or erasure that is a billion missing articulations of geologic
events to provide a counterforce or gravity to the historical junctures from
1492 to 1950 (under consideration by the Anthropocene Working Group for
the initiation event of the epoch). I want to challenge the racial blindness of
the Anthropocene as a willful blindness that permeates its comfortable
suppositions and its imaginaries of the planetary—imaginaries that constitute
its geographies of concern and attribution. As an erasure that is both
performed and obscured in the “point and erase” action of the naming of the
Golden Spikes, Blackness is a material index of resistance to the projection of
this Anthropocenic New World–Old World globalizing geography. Refusing
the neat placing of Anthropocene geosocial “events” in geology and the
reverberations of colonization that they represent, I offer an altered thinking
in concert with a billion Black Anthropocenes as a change of register. A
billion Black Anthropocenes names the all too many voidings of experiences
that span multiple scales, manifestations, and ongoing extractive economies,
in terms of the materiality and grammars that inculcate antiblackness through
a material geophysics of race. In this book, the writers of the Caribbean are
read as both counteraesthetic and counteranalytic to the carceral geo-logics of
white settlers in colonialism and New World slavery. While the book
sketches a limited engagement with the diverse histories of black and
indigenous studies, it instead tries to stay with these geographies of the
Caribbean and Americas as inchoate within the settler states of North
America and Europe. In the spirit of Brand’s poetics of maroonage and
Wynter’s concept of replantation, I have prioritized a patternation of thought
and practice in the inscription of geology rather than a more exacting
genealogy.[1] In the apprehension of geologic acts that underpin the
Anthropocene-in-the-making, I recognize geology as a racial formation from
the onset and, in its praxis, as an extractive and theoretical discipline.
 Geology, Race, and Matter
Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we?
—N. K. JEMISIN, The Fifth Season

Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past.

Inheritances are chosen as much as they are passed on. The past
depends less on “what happened then” than on the desires and
discontents of the present. Strivings and failures shape the stories
we tell. What we recall has as much to do with the terrible things
we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn. But
when does one decide to stop looking to the past and instead
conceive of a new order? When is it time to dream of another
country or to embrace other strangers as allies or to make an
opening, an overture, where there is none? When is it clear that the
old life is over, a new one has begun, and there is no looking back?
From the holding cell was it possible to see beyond the end of the
world and to imagine living and breathing again?
—SAIDIYA HARTMAN, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic
Slave Route

Across the spaces and places of geology, its languages of description and
dispossession, the question of the Anthropocene shapeshifts, world making in
epochal pronouncements of the “New World” of humanity, world breaking in
the formation of the “Ends” of master subjects: Man, History, Civilization. In
its brief tenure, the Anthropocene has metamorphosed. It has been taken up
in the world, purposed, and put to work as a conceptual grab, materialist
history, and cautionary tale of planetary predicament. Equally, this planetary
analytic has failed to do the work to properly identify its own histories of
colonial earth-writing, to name the masters of broken earths, and to redress
the legacy of racialized subjects that geology leaves in its wake. It has failed
to grabble with the inheritance of violent dispossession of indigenous land
under the auspices of a colonial geo-logics or to address the extractive
grammars of geology that labor in the instrumentation and
instrumentalization of dominant colonial narratives and their subjective, often
subjugating registers that are an ongoing praxis of displacement.
Modern liberalism is forged through colonial violence, and slavery is at
least coterminus with its ideas and experiences of freedom, if not with the
material root of its historical possibility. Thus the ways in which geology
underwrites that continuum—of liberal subjectivity and its historicity—and
how geology as a praxis materially carries this relation into the future should
matter in an epochal swerve. As the Anthropocene proclaims the language of
species life—anthropos—through a universalist geologic commons, it neatly
erases histories of racism that were incubated through the regulatory structure
of geologic relations. The racial categorization of Blackness shares its
natality with mining the New World, as does the material impetus for
colonialism in the first instance. This means that the idea of Blackness and
the displacement and eradication of indigenous peoples get caught and
defined in the ontological wake of geology. The human and its subcategory,
the inhuman, are historically relational to a discourse of settler-colonial rights
and the material practices of extraction, which is to say that the categorization
of matter is a spatial execution, of place, land, and person cut from relation
through geographic displacement (and relocation through forced settlement
and transatlantic slavery). That is, racialization belongs to a material
categorization of the division of matter (corporeal and mineralogical) into
active and inert. Extractable matter must be both passive (awaiting extraction
and possessing of properties) and able to be activated through the mastery of
white men. Historically, both slaves and gold have to be material and
epistemically made through the recognition and extraction of their inhuman
properties. These historic geologic relations and geo-logics span Europe, the
Americas, Africa, and Asia through the movement of people, objects, and
racial and material categories. Thus becoming post-racial through
Anthropocenic speciation is a foil of the humanist trickster (Yusoff and
Thomas 2018)—one that places an injunction on the recognition of historic
modes of geopolitical mattering while maintaining unequal relations of power
through continued environmental exposures.
In this moment of reinscribing geology as a property of personhood in the
Anthropocene (in the strategy of geologizing the social and socializing the
geologic), there is a need to think with its former lives of inscription, not just
those currently searched for in the strata. Or, to put it another way, what
modes of geologic life[1] (material and psychic) are already imbricated in
geologic practices, often in violent ways? Geology is a mode of
accumulation, on one hand, and of dispossession, on the other, depending on
which side of the geologic color line you end up on. In this book, I ask how
geology is being reelaborated in the Anthropocene and consider what
historicity would resist framing this epoch as a “new” condition that forgets
its histories of oppression and dispossession. This project seeks to write a
prehistory that is sufficient to the radical ambivalence of the afterlives of
geology—of indigenous dispossession of land and sovereignty in the invasion
of the Americas through to the ongoing petropolitics of settler colonialism; of
slavery, “breaking rocks on the chain gang” (as Nina Simone sings it), to the
current incarnations of antiblackness in mining black gold; and of the
racialized impacts of climate change. To redress how geology makes property
relations and properties a relation of subjugation is to challenge the
incompleteness of address in the Anthropocene.
Even as the Anthropocene extends its purview over geology within an
explicitly politicalized optic on geomorphic processes, it is a “view from
nowhere.” The God’s-eye view is inverted into a lithic-eye view to produce a
geologic commons from below (Yusoff 2017b). The unification of its vision
across the time and space of geologic practices seemingly offers an
undifferentiating and indifferent politic. Apprehending the past in the present
colonial mining empires of white settler nations frames White Geology as a
historical regime of material power, not a genetic imaginary. In this book, I
want to redress how the descriptive qualities of geology’s nomenclature
produce what Hartman calls a “cultivated silence” about the normalcy of
those extractive modes as deracialized. To address this silence would be to
understand geology as a regime for producing both subjects and material
worlds, where race is established as an effect of power within the language of
geology’s objects. Specifically, the border in the division of materiality (and
its subjects) as inhuman and human, and thus as inert or agentic matter,
operationalizes race.
White Geology makes legible a set of extractions, from particular subject
positions, from black and brown bodies, and from the ecologies of place. The
collective functioning of geologic languages coded—inhuman, property,
value, possession—as categories moves across territory, relation, and flesh. It
is not just that geology is a signifier for extraction but that a transmutation of
matter occurs within that signification that renders matter as property, that
makes a delineation between agency and inertness, which stabilizes the cut of
property and enacts the removal of matter from its constitutive relations as
both subject and mineral embedded in sociological and ecological fields.
Thus I argue that the semiotics of White Geology creates atemporal
materiality dislocated from place and time—a mythology of disassociation in
the formation of matter independent of its languages of description and the
historical constitution of its social relations.
The division between the figures of the human and inhuman and its
manifestations in subjective life exhibits one of the most terrible
consequences of the division of materiality organized and practiced as a
biopolitical tool of governance. The division of matter into nonlife and life
pertains not only to matter but to the racial organization of life as
foundational to New World geographies. The biopolitical category of
nonbeing is established through slaves being exchanged for and as gold.
Slavery was a geologic axiom of the inhuman in which nonbeing was made,
reproduced, and circulated as flesh. This unmaking of subjects constitutes a
warp of dispossession in the progressive narrative of collective accumulation
or geologic commons in which “we” all share. The rendering of nonbeings in
colonial extractive practices through the designation of inhuman or geologic
life, its exchange and circulation, demonstrates what Christina Sharp (2009)
calls the “monstrous intimacy” of the subjective powers of geology, where
gold shows up as bodies and bodies are the surplus of mineralogical
extraction. The inhuman is a call across categories, material and symbolic,
corporeal and incorporeal, intimacies cut across life and nonlife in the
indifferent register of matter.
Geology (and its fossil objects) have been entwined with questions of
origins, processes of racialization through speciation and notions of progress,
as well as being a praxis for inscripting racial logics within the material
politics of extraction that constitutes lived forms of racism (from eugenics to
environmental racism). To trace racial matterings across the category of the
inhuman, and specifically the traffic between the inhuman as matter and the
inhuman as race, is to examine how the concept of the inhuman is a
connective hinge in the twinned discourses of geology and humanism. It is a
hinge that establishes an extractive axis in both subjective and geologic (or
planetary) life. Race (and the Human) is tied most noticeably to fossil
narratives (Yusoff 2013, 2016) and racialized processes of extraction, but it is
also resident in modes of racial discourse in relation to ideas of property,
possession, and land use. In the categorization of matter as property and
properties, both spatial dispossession of land (for extraction) and
dispossessions of persons in chattel slavery (as another form of spatial
extraction) are enacted. The slave in this formulation is rendered as matter,
recognized through an inhuman property relation—what Saidiya Hartman
calls fungibility—as a commodity with properties, but without subjective will
or agency (or “flesh,” as Hortense Spiller has it). Rendering subjects as
inhuman matter, not as persons, thereby facilitated and incorporated the
historical fact of extraction of personhood as a quality of geology at its
inception.
Following the work of Hartman and Spillers, I want to pay attention to the
grammars of geology and to think with the modes of objectification that the
genre of the Anthropocene both unleashes and maintains. This material
language of the inhuman and its production of the subjective category of
nonbeing set up historical deformations and present impossibilities for
subjective life, specifically in what Hartman (1997) calls the “afterlives of
slavery.” The mine and the afterlives of its geomorphic acts constitute the
materiality of the Anthropocene and its natal moment, from the
transformation of mineralogy of the earth in the extraction of gold, silver,
salt, and copper to the massive transformation of ecologies in the movement
of people, plants, and animals across territories, coupled with the intensive
implantation of monocultures of indigo, sugar, tobacco, cotton, and other
“alien” ecologies in the New World. The complex histories of those afterlives
of slavery continued in the chain gangs that laid the railroad and worked the
coal mines through to the establishment of new forms of energy, in which,
Stephanie LeMenager (2014, 5) comments, “oil literally was conceived as a
replacement for slave labor.” Approaching race as a geologic proposition (or
geologies of race) is a way, then, to open up the imbrication of inhuman
materials and relations of extraction that go beyond a place-based
configuration of environmental racism as a spatial organization of exposure
to environmental harm. There is a need to examine the epistemological
framings and categorizations that produce the material and discursive world
building through geology in both its historical and present forms.
Specifically, in the lexicon of geology—as a naming of property and
properties—certain extractive modes are configured and deployed to enact
dispossession across territorial and subjective registers. Geology is
historically situated as a transactional zone in which propertied and
proprietorial concepts of self are entangled—as the entanglement of slavery
versus freedom and the material forms of social subjective life versus liberal
individuation.
If the first stake at redressing political geology is to call for the disruption
of the connotative powers of language—the exchangeability between human
and thing, subject and matter—then the second is to follow this suspension
with an orientation that acknowledges the afterlife of this disruption as an
ongoing struggle of reorientation in valuing black life and in concomitant
struggles for uncontaminated water, air, and land. Why is it that the language
of geology allows for the exchange of a person as a material object of
property and properties (a unit of corporeal energy), and how does it bypass
established biopolitical registers of critique? What are the psychic figurations
of gold and slave in the colonial cartographic imagination that allow this
symbolic and material exchange? The resolution of this interchangeability
happens in the geologic language of the inhuman and the lexicons of inert
and nonagentic matter. My intention is not to reclaim the inhuman as a
dialectical position from which to reframe humanist exclusions in relation to
their Others (because, as Wynter reminds us, the Human is an occupied
category); rather, I want to think with the inhuman as an analytic with which
to scrutinize the traffic between relations of race and material economy and to
think race as a material economy that itself emerges through the libidinal
economy of geology (as the desire for gold, mineralogy, and metallurgy). But
what are the relays involved between the classifications of geology and the
classifications of race? How does slavery function as an inhuman “category
mistake” (Spillers 2003, 20) of geology? Between mineral-as-property and
person-as-property, after Spillers, “the question for me remains the
concatenation itself—what in the nature of ‘property’ might have provoked a
sufficient enough displacement and condensation along a sequence of
analogical thinking that would bring it within the scope of ‘human’” (Spillers
2003, 20)?
Addressing the racialization of geology within the context of the new
origin stories that are being fashioned in the search for the beginning of the
Anthropocene epoch, I think with the historicity that is being structured into
these events—what Dionne Brand (2017a) calls the “corpses of the humanist
narrative” that constitute the sedimented “nonevent” of those moments. This
subjective and subjugating geologic life happens in the fugitive or insurgent
space-time of Anthropocenic geology, yet it is the very quotidian practices
that constitute it and are constituting of subjects. This is to see the
Anthropocene as a psychopolitical staging of subjectivity as well as a
historical rendering of materiality (Yusoff 2015). If this project seems like a
counterhistory of geologic relations that is other to current articulation as a
linear narrative of accumulation, then mine is certainly an attempt to open an
investigation into that history and to the languages that carry the work of
geology in the world (as resource, extraction, inhuman, chattel). The birth of
a geologic subject in the Anthropocene made without an examination of this
history is a deadly erasure, rebirth without responsibility.
The revisiting of origin stories in the Anthropocene also contains a broader
question: what are the encroachments on subjective life that take place
through geology and its description of materiality? Another way to put this
would be to ask, how does the maintenance of structures of materiality (or
geologic codes) facilitate and perpetuate antiblackness and its forms of
subjugation, as well as ongoing settler colonialism? How is geology an
operation of power, as well as a temporal explanation for life on the planet?
And what are the intimate contours of its material possessions (as property
and extraction)? The exercise of power is not simply explained in terms of
how slavery engendered racialized subjects as objects but also within the
language of geology itself, which allowed such traversals to be made in the
first instance. The language of materiality and its division between life and
nonlife, and its alignment with concepts of the human and inhuman,
facilitated the divisions between subjects as humans and subjects priced as
flesh (or inhuman matter).
While the human and inhuman are so often mapped as binaries onto
organic and inorganic matter and its descriptions, as dialectics or defining
modes, there is an inframaterialism that often slips out of view in the
perceived autonomism of these states of matter that are rendered as either
biology or geology. Put differently, geology is often assumed to be without a
subject (thinglike and inert), whereas biology is secured in the recognition of
the organism (bodylike and sentient). Thinking Blackness in terms of the
relations of materiality, of coal black, black gold, black metal, and how these
are configured in discourses of geology and its lexicons of matter uncovers
the transactions between geology and inhumanism as a mode of both
production (or extraction) and subjection (or a violent mode of geologic life).
How do Blackness and the terminology of geology slip into each other as
equivalent substances? How is such an alchemy of slavery and geology
possible? How is geology as a discipline and extraction process cooked
together in the crucible of slavery and colonialism? How does this geology
(as a colonial and neocolonial strategy) enact territorial extraction (through
survey, classification, codification, and annexation)?
Following these lines of inquiry gives rise to questions about agency and
consent, around sentience and inhuman matter, and how material agency with
and without subjectivity is thought outside of the structures of cozy
humanism and its languages of existence. As Édouard Glissant (2010, xi)
makes clear, “I build my language with rocks.” Dionne Brand (1996, 76)
similarly writes, “I want to go against the ground, grind it in my teeth, but
most I want to plunge my hands in stone.” The history of Blackness by its
very negation in the category of nonbeing within economies of Whiteness
lives differently in the earth, where “blackness is defined here in terms of
social relationality rather than identity” (Hartman 1997, 56)—a relation
realized in a different material register as “an aesthetics of disruption and
intrusion . . . aesthetics of rupture and connection” (Glissant 1997, 151). In
this aesthetics of the earth, Glissant identifies the crux of the problem as the
transformation of land into territory: “Territory is the basis for conquest.
Territory requires filiation to be planted and legitimated. Territory is defined
by its limits, and they must be expanded” (151). In an act of intrusion, I seek
to undermine the givenness of geology as an innocent or natural description
of the world, to see its modes of inscription and circulation as a doubling of
the notion of property—property as a description of mineralogy and property
as an acquisition (as resource, land, extractive quality of energy or mineral).
This geologic lexicon is a practice that enacts colonialism through what
Sylvia Wynter called “scientific humanism” that is mobilized as a praxis for
dispossession.
The epistemological divisions of geology and biology and their respective
analytics of geopolitics and biopolitics divide the world between the skein of
biopolitical coercion and territorial arrangements of populations, leaving the
interaction between the geopolitical and biopolitical worlds as a problem of
how the politics of scale meshes into subjective life. This epistemic division
sediments a geo-logic that was necessary for colonial theft, because it
allowed slaves to turn into and displace gold and refused to acknowledge
indigenous relations with “dead” matter. For example, the Gold Coast as a
source of both gold and slaves was itself referred to as “the Mine” (Hartman
2007, 51). These relations found their neocolonial afterlives in the extraction
industries of former colonies. (For example, the British platinum mine on the
Bushveld Igneous Complex authorized attacks by police and security services
in 2012 on striking miners, leaving thirty-four miners dead.) Geology is a
relation of power and continues to constitute racialized relations of power, in
its incarnation in the Anthropocene and in its material manifestation in
mining, petrochemical sites and corridors, and their toxic legacies—all over a
world that resolutely cuts exposure along color lines.
While attention has been paid to the role of scientific epistemes in the
modern formation of race through colonization and enslavement stretching
across an epoch of imperial world building that is not yet at its end, the
historic subject (as European-Human and its Others) is conceived of as a
biologic, not a geologic, subject. As Elizabeth Povinelli (2016) comments,
the dominant mode of subjectivity of late liberalism is of the biocentric
subject. There is an obscurity or opacity accorded to geopolitical affects at
the level of the subject formations that exceeds the territorial impositions of
biopolitical orderings. By that, I mean that the geophysics of being has been
neglected in accounts of colonial violence. The intimacy of this geophysics as
an experiential and structural form of (geologic) life enacts sensibilities of
matter, time, gravity, mud, and weather as inhabitations that are absent from
the geospatial confinements of these geopolitics. Christina Sharpe (2016a,
134) says, “So we are here in the weather, here in the singularity. Here there
is disaster and possibility. And while ‘we are constituted through and by
continued vulnerability to this overwhelming force, we are not only known to
ourselves and to each other by that force’” (quoting Brand, emphasis
original). These counterhistories are found elsewhere in the narratives and
scenes of subjection, in excess of the complicated matrixes of colonial life, in
literature and music—not as expressions of those geopolitics but as a tactical
theoretical response that remakes subjectivity through the senses as a
concrete analytic. Wynter (n.d., 109) suggests that the axiomatic torque of
sensibility is made in provisional ground, “where the mind feels and the
senses become theoreticians.” This geophysics of being within the Empire of
Geology finds its trace and place in critical black aesthetics.
Monuments to Geologic Reason and
Provisional Ground
Seeking to monumentalize Anthropocene history is an attempt to reclaim an
“innocence” around this geohistory. The histories of the Anthropocene unfold
a brutal experience for much of the world’s racialized poor and without due
attention to the historicity of those events (and their eventfulness); the
Anthropocene simply consolidates power via this innocence in the present to
effect decisions that are made about the future and its modes of survival. The
sleight of hand of the Janus-faced discipline of geology (as extractive
economy and deep-time paleontology of life-forms) is to naturalize (and thus
neutralize) the theft of extraction through its grammars of extraction. Recast
as “development,” the colonial and settler-colonial dispossession of the
relation to land and geography was never something chosen without coercion.
So, monuments made to these moments of extraction only accrue the
extension of value to those colonial forces. To be included in the “we” of the
Anthropocene is to be silenced by a claim to universalism that fails to notice
its subjugations, taking part in a planetary condition in which no part was
accorded in terms of subjectivity. The supposed “we” further legitimates and
justifies the racialized inequalities that are bound up in social geologies.
My aim in this book is to make a narrative that refuses this account of the
earth and its subjects as units of economic extraction, while launching a
conversation about how political geology might look otherwise. The
attachment to writing with and against a social geology is not to “humanize”
geology so much as it is to understand how the languages that already reside
within it are mobilized as relations of power—and how a different economy
of description might give rise to a more exacting understanding of geologic
materiality that is less deadly (by refusing the routine brutalities of economies
of extraction and the legacy of colonial asset-making practices through
geology). Thinking of the Anthropocene as a set of material practices of
duration and arrival that brought this world into being, alongside the fact that
for a certain proportion of the world, the entire dismantling of this colonial
apparatus is a desired state, launches a call for a different kind of world
making. As the science fiction writer N. K. Jemisin and Hartman point out in
the epigraphs at the beginning of this chapter, the end of this world has
already happened for some subjects, and it is the prerequisite for the
possibility of imagining “living and breathing again” for others. If the
Anthropocene is delivering a new geochemical earth through the excess of
colonial practices, then it is not just the geophysical processes that need
attention but the whole history of world making as a geophysics of being—a
world making that was for the few and firmly committed to the
enlightenment project of liberal individualism and its exclusions. The social
life of geology, then, is not a biographical account of geology but a praxis, a
world making in the present, in light of the inheritances of past geosocial
formations. In the blocked horizon of the Anthropocene in which geology
emerges as an end-game negotiation with the planet and late liberalism,
geology can finally be recognized as a regime for producing subjects and
regulating subjective lives—a place where the properties of belonging are
negotiated.
Anthropocene monumentality is a way to unpack the language that
geology carries and a way to push a conversation that admonishes the idea of
the neutrality of geology as a language of the rocks and deep time, which is
immune or innocent of its current deadly configurations. What often becomes
“political” in geologic relations is infrastructure—mine, pipeline, coal field,
water rights, land dispossession, namely, material political economy. And
these infrastructures are embedded in important fights, which show up a
network of power relations and subordinations (such as the Dakota Access
Pipeline), but there is also a prior economy of power, a historical geography
of the discipline and its functioning (as academic formation and applied
material economy) that is preconfigured through a racialized geosocial
matrix. If we abandon the absurd notion that geology is somehow immune
from the violence and dispossession enacted through extraction of mineral
resources, then geology in its fully geosocial registers comes to the fore as a
force of transformation.[2]
What I am proposing is that geology is a racialized optic razed on the
earth. While the connection between geology and life is being recognized at
all manner of biological, chemical and geomorphic scales under the rubric of
the Anthropocene, the intimate contours of geologic life as a force and power
with subjective life remain decisively mute (Yusoff 2016, 2017b). Naming
can also be a covering over. The Anthropocene is a retooling of geology,
from a discipline of extractive and originary science to a philosophical
material formation. If the Anthropocene is retooling geology, there is a need
to retool the Anthropocene precisely because of how these territorial histories
are tethered to racializing matter. To move to substantiate the geomateriality
of race is to attempt to locate a disposition and position in the Anthropocene
that negates the invisible work of social reproduction in material relations,
which is the antiblack directionality of extraction and ongoing settler
colonialism.
It might be easier to contend that race is not a “problem” of geology but a
problem of humanism and its exclusions; blame the master, not the tools. But
geology is more than a tool; it is a technology of matter, its formulation and
the desire that shapes its incarnation. Initiating the Atlantic slave trade in the
protocapitalist moment of 1441, the first slaves sold in Lisbon, Portugal, were
conceived of as slaves within the “problem” of mining in Brazil: the
perceived difficulties of indigenous labor (given that 90 percent of the
population was wiped out due to violence and disease) and the properties that
were imagined to reside in black flesh on the Gold Coast. This act establishes
the first color line of White Geology. The solution of race becomes enfolded
in geology as a material technology of extraction, and the semiotics of race
become inscripted in geological modes of classification as a matter relation.
Often the analysis for slavery begins with the question of labor, which makes
sense, up until a point, but there is a desire that launches that point into
existence, that prompts the question, of labor for what? At this point, we
arrive at the explanation of the plantations, the sugar in the bowl, and the
cotton that needed picking, but before these precapitalist economies there was
the gold, silver, and copper mining that mobilized the hunger for the slavery,
and later, the sugar, that fueled the English working classes of the Industrial
Revolution in their extraction of coal (see Mintz 1985). As Césaire ([1956]
1969, 61) writes, “we are walking compost hideously promising tender cane
and silky cotton.” In the nonconsensual collaboration with inhuman
materiality as both a property of energy and in concert with other energy
sources (sugar, coal, mineral), slavery weaponized the redistribution of
energy around the globe through the flesh of black bodies.
As the largest forced migration of people in the world, the profits accrued
from the enslaved during the transatlantic slave trade laid the economic
foundation for Western Europe, the Caribbean, and the Americas. As text in
the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC,
in Washington, D.C.) bids us remember about the intimacies of these material
relations, “the human cost was the immense physical and psychological toll
on the enslaved. Their lives were embedded in every coin that changed
hands, each spoonful of sugar stirred into a cup of tea, each puff of a pipe,
and every bite of rice.” That the massive increase in sugar consumption in
1850 maps directly onto the massive increase in coal use is perhaps not
surprising, as sugar was the conversion of inhumane slave energy into fuel,
then back into human energy, plus inhuman energy, to produce
industrialization. Coal was the inhuman corollary of those dehumanized
black bodies. Coal black. Yet, histories of the Anthropocene ubiquitously
begin with meditations on the great white men of industry and innovation to
reinforce imperial genealogies. For example, “global warming is the
unintended by-product par excellence. A cotton manufacturer of early
nineteenth-century Lancashire who decided to forgo his old waterwheel and
invest in a steam engine, erect a chimney and order coal from a nearby pit did
not, in all likelihood, entertain the possibility that this act could have any kind
of relationship to the extent of Arctic sea ice, the salinity of Nile Delta soil,
the altitude of the Maldives, the frequency of droughts on the Horn of Africa”
(Malm 2015, 1). But why did the manufacturer not pause, if not to consider
global warming, then to consider the other “unintended by-products” of
cotton manufacturing? Why did the author not even take the presence of
cotton in the second line of his introduction to the book to be alerted to the
clamor and rattling of chains? In the cast of white men who shaped the world,
why did cotton not even “signal” another geography to this narrative of white
bibliography? Why did he locate his project in the imperial–colonial narrative
tropes of character, place, and agency? Isn’t this overwriting of the nonbeing
or excess of the inhuman and inhumanity the very issue that is at stake in the
“unintended by-product”? As James Baldwin and Margaret Mead (1971, 177)
suggest, “what we call history is perhaps a way of avoiding responsibility for
what has happened, is happening, in time.”
The movement of energy between enslaved bodies in plantations, plants,
long-dead fossilized plants, and industrialized labor is a geochemical
equation of extraction in the conversion of surplus. But this racialized
equation of energy is located in a larger field of production and semiotics of
extraction. Slavery is not a by-product of this process; rather, slavery is
driven by an indifferent extractive geo-logic that is motivated by the desire
for inhuman properties. Indigenous genocide and settler colonialism are also
part of these extractive geo-logics. In this sense, slavery can be seen not as a
confusion of subject–object in relation to inhuman categorization but as a
total submission to the principle of extraction that was exacted through
inhuman differentiation—“transformed from the human subject of his own
culture into the inhuman object of the European culture” (Wynter, n.d., 10,
emphasis original). The energy regimes that structure material extraction
were forced into black material and psychic life—of being energy for others,
of putting sugar in the bowl, and in the muscles of white labor; as an “object”
of geochemical energy and the rationalization of the black body; as energetic
pleasure in all its myriad forms that render the “open and absolute
vulnerability” (Sexton 2010, 44) of black and brown bodies to white
extraction regimes. This intervention is the beginning of asking about the
process by which such exchanges become possible.
Note on Erasure
The tense of this work and the impetus for its writing came out of a repeated
positioning within the white spaces of Anthropocene academic events and as
a response to the lack of recognition of race within those places. The
“extreme discretion of the scholarly community” (Hartman 2002, 771) in its
decision not to engage with race and settler colonialism most clearly refuted
the critical claims being made about the Anthropocene. More than the
ubiquitous social typology of dominant white men in the academy, it was the
question of the very Whiteness of geology itself as a material practice that
snagged for me. The development of an analytic of White Geology is
important for how the Anthropocene is conceived, in terms of its origin
stories and an environmental relation to come (beyond liberal individuation).
The persistent discomfort with comfortable exclusions meant that this work
started as a redress, writing toward a darker Anthropocene—the underbelly of
White Geology—but this seemed to leave the institutional structures of the
“event” of geology (and the language that it carried) firmly intact.
Understanding Blackness not as metaphor but as materiality (that has a
symbolic, territorial, and psychic life), the second part of the book expands
and undercuts the “events” of settler colonialism and anti-Blackness that are
being monumentalized in Golden Spikes. Hartman reminds the reader at the
onset of her seminal book Scenes of Subjection of the all-too-familiar and
reproducible “spectacular character of black suffering” (3), and it is my
intention here, at the caution of many black studies scholars, not to reproduce
the genre of black (social) death through geologic means. I do want to
acknowledge, however, how the praxis of geology was used as an instrument
of deformation in the possibilities of collective subjective and ecological life
for black and brown communities.
It would be straightforward, perhaps, to “fill out” the Anthropocene
through the dark context of its origin stories, but that would not repudiate the
structures of thought and material arrangements that brought the
Anthropocene into being in the first place. Work in black and indigenous
studies[3] is critical in this context precisely because it articulates intimate
confinements and ongoing containments of humanist thought, while
simultaneously calling for a reconfiguring of possibilities of subjective
experience. Furthermore, the exclusion of black and brown subjects from the
humanist master-subject and its ties to geographical dispossession (in
genocide, natal alienation, and ongoing environmental racism) has forged a
rearrangement of the structures and sounds of materiality in black and
indigenous experience. If the Anthropocene is viewed as a resurrection of the
impulse to reestablish humanism in all its exclusionary terms of universality,
then any critical theory that does not work with and alongside black and
indigenous studies (rather than in an extractive or supplementary mode) will
fail to deliver any epochal shift at all. It would be in Césaire’s words in the
epigraph to the book, to think the “thought of the other” without the “other of
thought.”
The hope for this work is to orient toward a less coercive geology through
the critique and expansion of its grammars. The problem of race has been
posed precisely as the problem of the human (that is, the figure of
humanism). But if we were to start with the prefiguration of the human, in its
inception within the technologies of the inhuman, a different model of
extraction would emerge. To put it another way, if the human is but one of
the problems of redress in colonialism, which, regardless of attempts at
negotiation, will remain an exclusive subjectivity in terms of both its
designation of rights (Wynter 2015; Bogue 2006) and the possibility of
empathy or reciprocity (Hartman 2007; Wilderston 2008), then starting with
the category of the inhuman liberates the possibility of a redescription of
relation that can “take place and have a place” (McKittrick 2011). In a
corollary to geology’s inhuman/inhumane modes of description, black poetics
is epoch making in its redirection of the racial logics of extraction through
new energetic modes and understandings of relation, desedimenting the
forms of inhuman historicity that are established through colonialism.
Hartman comments that these practices and poetics forged in the terror of
slavery were necessarily subterranean: “For this opacity, the subterranean and
veiled character of slave song must be considered in relation to the dominant
imposition of transparency and the degrading hypervisibility of the enslaved,
and therefore, by the same token, such concealment should be considered a
form of resistance” (Hartman 2007, 36). In the forced alliances with the
inhuman, a different mode of subjective relation is forged, where Blackness
is a name for nonnormative subjectivity (Moten 2003, 2016) or, in Césaire’s
([1972] 2000, 55) words, a “communistic materialism.”
Origin Stories for a New Epoch
The first part of this book, “Golden Spikes and Dubious Origins,”
concentrates on the origin stories of the Anthropocene, the so-called Golden
Spikes of geology, where a ubiquitous planetary mark in the strata
consecrates the epochal shift. In this political stratigraphy, I trace the
historiography of Colonial Man to Anthropocene Man to frame the so-called
Geology of Mankind as a privileged subjective space. Then, by looking at the
originary stories of the Anthropocene—1610 Columbian “exchange”; 1800s
industrialization; 1950s Great Acceleration—I argue how coloniality and
anti-Blackness are materially inscribed into the Anthropocene. Material
stories are origin stories—stories that reproduce not just arrangements of
matter but subjects through divisions of matter. This formation of geologic
origination is important to consider in the construction of the Anthropocene
in both narrative and material domains precisely because of the power of
stories to designate scenes of agency and accountability. Colonial strategies
of occupation have long concentrated on genealogy to identify (and thus
coerce) existing political authority and to identify an anthropology of
“Otherness” that marks the colonized through a divisive cut of difference
(which in turn justified theft of territory and persons).[4] And, beyond this
recognition of the power of origin stories and their hold on the present, there
is a need to register the aesthetic–symbolic qualities of oppression as a mode
of categorization that is already implicated in the organization of subjective
lives through geology.
The subsequent chapter, “The Inhumanities,” locates the historic work of
geology in the racialization of matter through slavery and histories of
geologic surveying in the establishing settler colonialism. Starting with
Charles Lyell’s speculations on geology and slavery in his 1845 Travels in
North America, I discuss these entwined scenes to show how the organization
and categorization of matter enact racialization. This enactment is productive
of both a racial logics that extends through and beyond mineralogy and a
deterritorialization that accompanies extraction. Geology provides the geo-
logics to elide those attachments through its classification system of value
and resource, while slavery leaves subjects marooned and captured in the
indices of the inhuman. This chapter addresses how the social formation of
geology through modes of classification, ordering, and representation is a
mattering grid of colonialism or a taxonomy of race. I suggest that there is a
tight material rapport between the designation and organization of the
inhuman as mineralogy/geology and the inhumane that is established via an
attachment to liberal humanism (and its reincarnation in Anthropocene
discourses).
The next chapter, “Insurgent Geology: A Billion Black Anthropocenes
Now,” opens up questions about the flesh of the Anthropocene that were
raised in the previous chapters through its origin stories and (in)humanist
frames. It seeks to take apart the construction of the “event” of geology by
staging an engagement with slavery and subjugation, and rather than
overwriting nonbeing (again), I follow Caribbean and diaspora writers into
the wake, weather, and alluvial mud of colonial dissipation to explore the
silenced archives of geologic acts. Specifically, this chapter engages with
Sylvia Wynter’s unpublished manuscript “Black Metamorphosis,” in which
she attends to the “metamorphosis by which the multi-tribal African became
the native of that area of experience that we term the New World” or the
process of transplantation (as she terms it) (Wynter, n.d., 2). Finally, I follow
recent critical moves in black aesthetics to question how starting with the
“End of the World” might release a more exacting critique of this geologic
epoch and its material registers of being, liberated from liberal subjectivity
into an alternate geophysics of being by a reworking of gravity.
In moving toward the idea of a billion Black Anthropocenes, I am not
advocating that indigenous and colonized peoples’ knowledge practices be
mobilized as an experimental outside or supplement to Western scientific
knowledge practices. Rather, I want to suggest that race, following Silva
(2007), might be considered as foundational to the production of Global-
World-Space and geologic regimes of governance that become manifest in
the practices of White Geology (or the Anthropocene). Bearing in mind Toni
Morrison’s (1992, x) caution against the “metaphoric shortcuts” in relation to
Blackness, in which she urges a recognition of “language that can powerfully
evoke and enforce hidden signs of racial superiority, cultural hegemony, and
dismissive ‘othering’ of people and language,” addressing origin stories is not
just about making an alternative or alt-anthro-scene. Rather, it is to be
attentive to what histories of the earth provide a break in analysis and
narratives of material relations and languages of description that have
colonized it, and to begin to make histories that launch a praxis for an
insurgent geology into being—an insurgent geology that is, to paraphrase
Brand, flooded with the world. This is where materiality is used to establish
the presentness of Blackness as an obligation to the present, to counter its
erasure through a poetry that cuts into coloniality as counteraesthetic (Brand
2017b). To this end, I write not toward White Geology but toward the
“nonevent” of a billion Black Anthropocenes.

I must begin.
Begin what?
The only thing in the world that’s worth beginning:
The End of the World, no less (Césaire [1956] 1969, 39)
 Golden Spikes and Dubious
Origins
Too much has been made of origins. All origins are arbitrary. This
is not to say that they are not also nurturing, but they are essentially
coercive and indifferent
—DIONNE BRAND, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

The white utopia was black inferno.

—SYLVIA WYNTER, “Unsettling the Coloniality of
Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Toward the Human, After Man, Its
Overrepresentation—An Argument,” The New Centennial Review
The Fabulation of Beginnings
As the Anthropocene signals alarm bells over human–planetary ends, the
search is under way for its beginnings. To be established as an epoch, the
Anthropocene must be tethered to an origin that confirms “you are Here” in
the Age of Humans. In the discourse that surrounds the empirics of fossil
traces, foundational myths of how and why “we” got here are being
instigated. But this “we” cannot be immune to who is writing and mobilizing
this history and the implications of its telling for who is granted agency in
shaping the present and future. While the search for the Golden Spike is a
disciplinary endeavor to geologically map the material relation of space and
time according to stratigraphic principles and scientific precedents, these
spikes are not real places as such; they are trace effects in material worlds
that infer the event/advent of this most political geology. In this chapter, I
want to draw attention to the interlinked material and conceptual architectures
of slavery and industrialization and their interlocutors, humanism and race, to
argue that geologic origin stories function as identity politics that coheres
around an exclusive notion of humanity (coded white). I start by examining
the fabulation of beginnings in the quest for the Golden Spike as prologue to
a discussion about who gets spiked by geology (or, what color is the flesh of
geology?).
The scientific community offer us three possible material beginnings for
the Anthropocene subject: the Columbian “exchange” and “Orbis hypothesis”
event (Lewis and Maslin 2015) (1610); the Industrial Revolution and James
Watt’s steam engine (1800); and the “Great Acceleration” and nuclear
isotopes from missile testing. Although only informally added to the
chronostratigraphic chart, the Anthropocene Working Group (AWG)
delivered its findings to the thirty-fifth International Geological Congress in
South Africa in 2017, and a boundary marker, or Golden Spike, will likely be
agreed upon in the coming years (although there is much disagreement over
what constitutes a proper boundary marker). In other words, although origins
structure the axis of geological time, they are not immune to the narrative
overtures that trouble questions of origination elsewhere in political
geography. Graphia of rock is no less subject to world building than attempts
to calcify origins in projects of nationalism. Origins draw borders that define
inclusion and exclusion, and their focus is narrow, narrating a line of purpose
(read Progress) and purposefulness (read Civilization), while overlooking
accident, misdirection, or the shadow geology of disposable lives, waste,
toxicity, contamination, extinction, and exhaustion. There is not geology on
one hand and stories about geology on the other; rather, there is an axis of
power and performance that meets within these geologic objects and the
narratives they tell about the human story. Traveling back and forth through
materiality and narrative, the origins of the Anthropocene are intensely
political in how they draw the world of the present into being and give shape
and race to its world-making subjects.
This chapter focuses on the three moments of “Anthropogenesis” that are
under consideration by the International Commission on Stratigraphy to
unearth these monuments. Elsewhere, I use the term Anthropogenesis (Yusoff
2016) to refer to how materiality takes on an originary status in the
Anthropocene; origins constitute and conjoin the site and subjective life of
the Anthropocene through a geologic marker that pronounces the threshold
event of becoming a geologic agent of the planet. The anthropocentrism of
the Anthropocene is a world-making practice, nominating “1) the production
of a mythic Anthropos as geologic worldmaker/destroyer of worlds, and 2) a
material, evolutionary narrative that re-imagines human origins and endings
within a geologic rather than an exclusively biological context” (Yusoff
2016, 3). In this ascension to geologic force, the Anthropocene creates a
planetary genesis that ties the Anthropos to the creation of an epoch,
substituting human agency for geologic processes. Thereby geology is
designated as a subjective mode of the human and a universal model of
material agency that has inadvertently assumed mastery over geologic
processes. The sedimentation of this force of geology into subjective life is
both material and semantic. As Derrida would have it, nothing that can be
found in the end is not already prefigured in the origin. Origins configure and
prefigure the possibility of narratives of the present: the Anthropocene-in-the-
making. Origination of the event of this geologic happening organizes a
material and discursive space that arranges relations of power through the
constitution of beginnings and ends that reproduce formations of power in the
present through an account of materialities of the past.
As a mineralogical punctuation event in geologic processes, the
Anthropocene names an empire that is not yet at its end, and so any account
of the gravity and tense of that trajectory accounts for, and reorganizes,
understandings of ongoing geosocial processes. Origins, then, are another
word for an account of agency or a trajectory of power. Geology is a
transactional zone in which ideas of origins, subjectivity, and matter are
intertwined, with historical materialist roots that span a genealogy of
dispossession, uprooting, and extreme violence. In thinking about geology as
an intensely extractive praxis, there is a need to question what Eve Tuck and
K. Wayne Yang (2012, 1) call settler “moves to innocence” in the claims
about the newly found consciousness that permeates Anthropocenic scientific
and social scientific discourse. This is the claim that humanity has failed to
understand the violent repercussions of colonialism, industrialization, or
capitalist modes of production and that these violences were an unforeseen
by-product or excess of these practices and not a central tenet of them. Aptly,
capturing the geomatrix of racial formations and land dispossession under
colonialism, W. E. B. Du Bois (1920, 54) defined Whiteness as the
“ownership of the Earth for ever and ever.” Taking seriously the future
perfect tense of White Geology forces a consideration of where violence is
located in geologic practices and its modes of recognition (as geologic
“event” and subjective marks). The Anthropocenic “history lesson” in which
humanity undergoes a sudden realization of the violent and repressive
dimensions of coloniality and then, in the eclipse of modernity, puts these
violences firmly in the past, while continuing to perpetuate them through an
ongoing settler-colonial present, can be seen in this example from Paul
Crutzen and Christian Schwäger (2011):

To master this huge shift, we must change the way we

perceive ourselves and our role in the world. Students in
school are still taught that we are living in the Holocene, an
era that began roughly 12,000 years ago at the end of the last
Ice Age. But teaching students that we are living in the
Anthropocene, the Age of Men, could be of great help. Rather
than representing yet another sign of human hubris, this name
change would stress the enormity of humanity’s responsibility
as stewards of the Earth. It would highlight the immense
power of our intellect and our creativity, and the opportunities
they offer for shaping the future. . . . The awareness of living
in the Age of Men could inject some desperately needed eco-
 optimism into our societies. . . . With countries worldwide
striving to attain the “American Way of Life,” citizens of the
West should redefine it—and pioneer a modest, renewable,
mindful, and less material lifestyle. . . . We also need to
develop geoengineering capabilities in order to be prepared for
worst-case scenarios. (emphasis added)

This attempt to absolve the positionality of Western colonial knowledge and

extraction practices, while simultaneously reinforcing and resettling them in a
new territory—a Western frontier of pioneers armed with eco-optimism and
geoengineering—indicates a desire to overcome coloniality without a
corresponding relinquishing of the power it continues to generate in terms of
who gets to formulate, implement, and speak to/of the future. In this
imagination of humanity, the heirs of an “American Way of Life” (or white
reproductive settler colonialism) structure a color line of agency.
Notwithstanding the references to frontierism, Western modernity, and the
“citizens of the West” as the guarantors of intellect and creativity, the epochal
sea change that is imagined actually reinstates the same old story of
dominion, articulated through Judeo-Christian stewardship of Empire. The
colonial assumption for the responsibility for and of the world is articulated
anew as the white man’s burden—a paternalism that is tied to a redemptive
narrative of saving the world from harm on account of others while
maintaining the protective thick skin of innocence.
What Crutzen and Schwäger (2011) do so expertly is to narrate the
imagined steps toward progress and triumph over Anthropocenic conditions
that are already secreted within these discursive formations. While Crutzen
(2002, 23) himself notes that “these effects have largely been caused by only
25% of the world population,” his assumption of “responsibility” (and thus
agency, in the formulation of origins = agency) is misplaced. It is a false
evolutionism that designates a single point of experience from which
departure for the future is projected. As Brand (2001, 82) reminds us, there is
no ground zero in relation; “it never occurs to them that they live on the
cumulative hurt of others. They want to start the clock of social justice only
when they arrive. But one is born into history, one isn’t born into a void.”
Right behind claims of naming, interpretation, and description come the
proposal of solutions and the delimitation of scenes of power. Crutzen
presents us with a contrite Western civilization that, despite the obvious
repressed excesses of its geologic formations—named the Anthropocene—
continues to devise hegemonic aspirations that deny both those subjective
repressions and the multisovereignties they represent. Those histories of
black and brown Undercommons (Moten and Harney 2013) are contorted
into an oversight of civilization, as are the environmental effects of
colonialism and industrialization, making way for a present that continues to
privilege the privileged. The solutions and proposals are all about the
continuance of the current stasis of inequality, powered by other means. In
this telling, the Anthropocene is white man’s overburden.[1]
Material Markers; or, What and Who Get
Marked in Anthropocene Origin Stories
A formal geologic unit of time requires a global stratotype section and point
or a Golden Spike in the strata, plus other stratigraphic markers that indicate
long-term shifts in the earth system to mark the boundary. As a geologic
event, the Anthropocene is unusual insomuch as it does not present the usual
millions of years to achieve its geologic swerve but must rely on decadal or
century scales. As a stratigraphic event, the Anthropocene represents a
compression of geologic time. As Lewis and Maslin (2015, 171) make clear,

unlike other geological time unit designations, definitions will

probably have effects beyond geology. For example, defining
an early start date may, in political terms, “normalize” global
environmental change. Meanwhile, agreeing [on] a later start
date related to the Industrial Revolution may, for example, be
used to assign historical responsibility for carbon dioxide
emissions to particular countries or regions during the
industrial era. More broadly, the formal definition of the
Anthropocene makes scientists arbiters, to an extent, of the
human–environment relationship, itself an act with
consequences beyond geology.

While there is recognition from geologists of the power of naming in the

formalization of the Anthropocene—“formalization is a complex question
because, unlike with prior subdivisions of geological time, the potential
utility of a formal Anthropocene reaches well beyond the geological
community” (Waters et al. 2016, 137)—this awareness of the social stakes is
accompanied by a claim of the neutrality of geology as a “pragmatic” and
“dispassionate” practice. Waters et al. say,

We are aware of the narratives that may be built around the

Anthropocene, and how these may be influenced by boundary
choice. However, we suggest that the positioning of a
stratigraphic boundary should simply be pragmatically and
dispassionately chosen, by the same manner in which all
 earlier stratigraphic boundaries were chosen, to allow the most
effective practical division between what would then become
(by definition) Anthropocene and pre-Anthropocene strata and
history. Such a choice would, we consider, be the best
guarantee that wider discussion is solidly founded on the best
factual basis available. (137)

What is considered as a dimension of the possible scope of this new political

geology (part geoscience, part planetary alarm) is quickly acknowledged and
then passed over as geology is consigned back to inhuman objecthood and
objective language. Geology as a mode of embodied thinking remains
restricted, unable to acknowledge the excess of this praxis in either world or
subject-making dimensions.
1610
The earliest suggested date in the history of material exchanges is the 1610
thesis (Lewis and Maslin 2015), dating the Anthropocene’s start to the
European invasion of the Americas, or “New World,” and the so-called
exchange in flora and fauna. Authors Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin call this
the “Collision of the Old and New Worlds.” Tying the Anthropocene to
conquest makes explicit the colonial relation, but how does this rupture of
bodies, flesh, and worlds become buried in the notion of exchange and
contact? On his second voyage in 1493 to the New World (modern
Dominica), Columbus initiates the first transatlantic slave voyage, a shipment
of several hundred Taino people sent from Hispaniola to Spain. In 1496, he
returns from his second voyage, carrying around thirty Native American
slaves. By 1510, there is the start of the systematic transportation of African
slaves to the New World. By the time Shakespeare’s play The Tempest is first
performed in 1611 (a year after the proposed start date), the enslaved figures
of Caliban and Ariel are familiar subjects in the Old World. The “collision of
the Old and New” covers over the friction of a less smooth, more corporeal
set of racialized violences. In the language of exchange, it might be assumed
that something was given rather than just taken. In that slippage of grammar,
I want to shake the innocence of a language of description that assails this
dehumanizing logic and masks its operations. The “nonevent” of this
geologic corporeality is the very contact zone of geosocial relations that the
Anthropocene attempts to speak to, yet it continues to do so in the
progressive narrative arc, which is also a narrative of the asymmetries of
colonial possession (of subjects, land, resources) and indigenous and black
dispossession. This “exchange” is the directed colonial violence of forced
eviction from land, enslavement on plantations, in rubber factories and mines,
and the indirect violence of pathogens through forced contact and rape.
Invasion instigates the disruption of ecological belonging and viable food
economies and the introduction of famine and permanent malnutrition. It is
the mutilation of land, personhood, spirituality, sexuality, and creativity. “No
human contact, but relations of domination and submission” (Césaire [1972]
2000, 42). It was a process of alienation from geography, self, and the
possibility of relation. Yet, “these heads of men, these collections of ears
[collected by the barrelful by Count d’Hérisson], these burned houses, these
Gothic invasions, this streaming blood, these cities that evaporate at the edge
of the sword, are not to be so easily disposed of” (41). Césaire argues that the
deliberate destruction and pride in dehumanization that characterized colonial
conquest was not just a butchery that was inflicted on the colonized but one
that also brutalized the colonizer: “the West has never been further from
being able to live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the
world” (73). The superimposition of colonialism was a shearing of subjects
from geography and the reinstantiation of those subjects into a category of
geology that recoded them as property, whereby extraordinary possibilities in
relation to the earth were wiped out.
The arrival of Europeans in the Caribbean in 1492 and the subsequent
colonialism of the Americas “led to the largest human population
replacement in the past 13,000 years” and to the mixing of previous separate
biotas, such as corn, maize, potatoes, sugarcane, wheat, and domesticated
animals such as cows, rats, goats, and pigs in new ecological formations and
plantation ecologies of the Americas (Lewis and Maslin 2015).[2] As
Europeans invaded the Caribbean, deforming and decimating the indigenous
“Caribs,” they began to use the islands as an experimental archipelago in
terms of both the social organization of categories of human and the
ecological arrangements of flora and fauna. The invasion of Europeans in the
Americas resulted in a massive genocide of the indigenous population,
leading to a decline from 54 million people in the Americas in 1492 to
approximately 6 million in 1650, a result of murder, enslavement, famine,
and disease. This led to a massive reduction in farming and the regeneration
of forests and carbon uptake or sequestration by forests, leading to an
observed decline in Antarctic ice cores of CO2 in the atmosphere. This “Orbis
spike” of systematic murder marks the instigation of Global-World-Space (an
understanding of the world as a global entity that is open to the conquest of
the entirety of its spatialized and subjective relations). Here the enslaved are
coded in parallel with material extraction under the guise of exchange.
“Colonization = thingification” (Césaire [1972] 2000, 42), where subjectivity
becomes fungible as a geographical as well as psychic and property entity. As
a descriptive project in the grammar of geology, this spike naturalizes
European colonial relations and their epistemological and ecological
transformations. The Anthropocene cannot dust itself clean from the
inventory of which it was made: from the cut hands that bled the rubber, the
slave children sold by weight of flesh, the sharp blades of sugar, all the
lingering dislocation from geography, dusting through diasporic generations.
The shift of grammar cannot keep the rawness out.
The 1610 natal moment does, however, tie the origin of the Anthropocene
to the death of 50 million indigenous people (80 to 95 percent of the
population), systematic violence, and chattel slavery. This spike of brutality,
sadism, and death, coupled with the subsequent dispossession of indigenous
peoples from their land and the beginnings of industrial global slavery, enacts
a foundational spatial inscription of colonialism (and race) into a monument
of global environmental change. Inscribed in this origin of the Anthropocene
is what Michael Taussig (1986, 4) calls a “space of death.” The
Anthropocene began with the annihilation of the Colonial Other and an
epochal redescription of geography as Global-World-Space (Yusoff 2017a).
That is, the fungibility of Blackness and geologic resources (as land,
minerals, and ores) is coeval, predicated on the ability of the colonizer to both
describe and operationalize world-space as a global entity (see Silva 2007). In
this spike, the colonial Other is displaced, along with existing ecological
relations and connections of the colonized to earth. As Global-World-Space
is established by the colonizers, the Human and its Others are bifurcated in
the production of racial difference to create two worlds of colonizer and
colonized—or two different species, as Fanon would have. Coloniality cuts
across both flesh and earth in the economies of valuation it established,
exacting an “incorporative exclusion from space” (Moten 2016, 12) for the
colonized as subjective agents and agents of geography. Indigenous genocide
and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power
becoming operationalized in premodernity, a way in which subjects get (what
Wynter names) “selected” or “dysselected” from geography and coded into
colonial possession through dispossession.
The color line of the colonized was not merely a consequence of these
structures of colonial power or a marginal effect of those structures; it was/is
a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as
foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and
of global space). Richard Eden, in the popular 1555 publication Decades of
the New World, compares the people of the “New World” to a blank piece of
“white paper” on which you can “paynte and wryte” whatever you wish.
“The Preface to the Reader” describes the people of these lands as inanimate
objects, blank slates waiting to be civilized by the Europeans:
 these simple gentiles lyvinge only after the lawe of nature,
may well bee likened to a smoothe and bare table unpainted,
or a white paper unwritten upon, upon the which yow may at
the first paynte and wryte what yow lyste. (sig. C3v)

As land is made into tabula rasa for European inscription of its militant maps,
so too do Indigenes and Africans become rendered as a writ or ledger of flesh
scribed in colonial grammars.
“Black Metamorphosis,” 1452
Wynter suggests that we should in fact consider 1452 as the beginning of the
New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the
Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar–slave” complex—a
massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people (existing
ecologies were not immune to the ravages of the new invaders, from plants
and domestic animals to microbiomes and new geomorphic regimes). Wynter
argues that the importance of the New World is in its dual processes of the
“reduction of Man to Labour and of Nature to Land under the impulsion of
the market economy.” Wynter forcefully demonstrates how “Man” appears as
the ontological signification of Whiteness and how this rational man is
established as the biologically selected being, established first through
Cartesian man and then through biologism as an advanced evolutionary
subject within concepts of geologic time. Weheliye (2002, 27) calls this “dis-
dentification, wherein whiteness connotes the full humanity only gleaned in
relation to the lack of humanity in blackness.” The effect of this doubling of
Man/Whiteness in the natal moment of “his” heuristic formation disabuses
the idea of humanity as an ontological category that has a nonracialized
primacy. Weheliye argues, “In black culture this category becomes a
designation that shows its finitudes and exclusions very clearly, thereby
denaturalizing the ‘human’ as a universal formation while at the same time
laying claim to it” (27). In reclaiming humanity as a heuristic operation rather
than an ontological formation, Wynter plots the historic formation of Man as
a racialized subject that is exclusionary at the point of origin, and precisely
because of the history of those murderous origins. Wynter adds to her
revolutionary formation of Man[3] (and his overrepresentation) in “Black
Metamorphosis,” where she considers the relations between land and territory
in the organization of Colonial Man’s “humanity” and the geographies of
erasure that underpin it in this conquest of space.
Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the
Portuguese travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of
humanness” (Silva 2015, 93) in the idea of race. This refiguring of slaves
trafficked to gold mines is borne into the language of the inhuman,
whereupon Blackness becomes characterized through its ledger of matter,
which in turn populates the idea of race. Extending Wynter’s argument, 1492
marks also the structural inclusion of Man’s Others into the geological
lexicon of the inhuman (as matter and energy) and the exclusion from its
material wealth, whereby humanness becomes differentiated by the inhuman
objectification of indigenous and black subjects. While Wynter argues that
this devaluation of Blackness served the specific material purpose of labor
and the colonization of Indian land, there is also a prior step in the
identification of inhuman objects that generated the context of “needs” for
such labor and dispossession. Voiding subjects was also about voiding a
relation to earth that was embodied, organized, and intensified by those
relations to place; taking place is also taking ways in which people realize
themselves through the specific geologies of a land. Colonialism enacted
multiple forms of geologic disruption as well as the more obvious forms of
extractive dispossessions.
Wynter contends that the revaluation of black life and the resistance to
dehumanization could only be made through the “creation of a counter-
culture through the transplantation of their old cultures onto a strange soil, its
reinvention in new and alien conditions. It was in this transplantation, this
metamorphosis of an old culture into a new, that the blacks made themselves
indigenous to their new land” (Wynter n.d., 46–47). This also involved the

transplantation of a traditional relationship to nature, a

relationship under the inspiration of which the slave, now in
exile, both adapted himself to Nature and transformed it. In
this type of relationship the land (i.e. part of Nature) could not
be regarded as a mere commodity in the land-labor-capital-
relationship. New world land, like the land in Africa was still
seen as the Earth—the communal means of production. This
attitude, transferred and perpetuated, was the central grid for
many old beliefs which could be retranslated into a new
reality. (47)

Descriptions of the lives of slaves in Jamaica in the seventeenth century by

English clergyman the Rev. John Taylor stress the “great veneration” which
the slaves had for “the Earth.” It may be precisely because land and labor
were regarded as private property that the earth became a source of
possibility to release the literal stranglehold of that incarceration in a
propertied relation.
 In the struggle against forms of propertied relation with the inhuman,
different intimacies developed with the earth. Wynter (n.d.) discusses the
importance of the plot accorded to slaves to grow their own food in slave
replantation. She says,

The plot was the slave’s area of escape from the plantation, it
was an area of experience which reinvented and therefore
perpetuated an alternative world view, alternative
consciousness to that of the plantation. This world view was
marginalized by the plantation but never destroyed. In relation
to the plot, the slave lived in a society partly created as an
adjunct to the market, partly as an end in itself. (53)

While growing food was a basic requirement for the reproduction of labor
power for the plantation, it also became part of the reproduction of cultural
powers in a new land, to establish a less alienated relation to the earth: “Let
me be contained between latitude and longitude” (Césaire [1956] 1969, 28).
The relation of slave to provision ground was a relation to a contingent earth,
a material relation forged in resistance to the dehumanizing of colonialism
that opened a carceral geography.
The earth in its symbolic and nonabstracted forms (as a knowledge about
survival in maroonage, the quotidian practices of harvesting useful plants and
animals, and navigation) was a crucial aspect of slave revolts. Wynter (n.d.,
71) argues, “Black slavery in the Caribbean was synonymous with black
revolt against slavery. And these revolts would be crucial to the
indigenization process.” Maroonage becomes the practice of cultural
resistance to slavery. Wild mountain and interior living was also a successful
part, Wynter argues, of replantation to the new land and the confrontation
with its unfamiliar geographical conditions. She discusses at length the oaths
to earth that were sworn before rebellions and how these were oaths to
ancestors replanted in a new land—and that such oaths could not be broken
despite the horrendous torture of those captured, in a context where “property
that had rebelled, thereby affirming its status as human, must be burnt (i.e.
tortured) as a ‘terror’ to other ‘property’ who might want to assert their
human status” (79). Kissing the earth before rebellions was an oath-act that
maintained a social contract with the earth often to the point of death (81–83).
Wynter argues that this “indigenization”[4] was a way of thinking and
apprehending the material reality of slavery through a dynamic replanting of
roots (or “transplanting” as Wynter calls it) in an alien context: “this is the
process of black cultural resistance and response to the Middle Passage and
to what lay on the farther side—the alienated reality of a New World, new
not only in its geography, but also in its radically different experience” (7).
Disrupting the grammar of the inhuman articulated through thirteenth- to
nineteenth-century genealogies of race, planting roots through maroonage
and cultivation established kinship with the earth, made in the context of
natal alienation.
In the path of the totality of alienation, the achievement in Haiti was to put
down roots in a “stranger” soil, which “made the soil their own” (Wynter,
n.d., 17) in ways that were not predicated on the notion of territory under
colonialism. As Price-Mars (quoted in Wynter, n.d.) said, the planet rather
than humanism became the sphere of recognition for the Haiti Revolution;
“our presence on a spot of that American archipelago which we ‘humanized,’
the breach which we made in the process of historical events to snatch our
place among men,” was worthy of study, a particular achievement that could
be placed “within the common life of man on the planet” (Wynter, n.d., 17).
Such a rupture in the fabric of colonialism’s codification of personhood and
space was an extraordinary reclamation of both freedom and its geographical
expression. Wynter argues that since “needs produce powers just as powers
produce needs,” the response to the dehumanizing alienation was “to create
the new vocabulary of the new existence” (Price-Mars, as quoted in Wynter,
n.d., 18). Wynter argues that alienation is an inherently dynamic concept that
implies change, “a consciousness of being alienated.” For Price-Mars, the
study of the folklore of Haiti was a study of transplantation, where
indigeneity becomes fused with the site of the struggle, essentially a
geographical, soil-based process of rerooting and of learning new forms of
planting oneself in the earth. “Haiti where negritude rose to its feet for the
first time and said it believed in its own humanity” (Césaire [1956] 1969, 29).
Wynter (n.d.) calls this process “cultural metamorphosis,” but it is also a
geological metamorphosis tethered to the place, site, and soil of struggle.
While slave owners tried to void their subjects as inhuman objects, Wynter
(n.d.) argues that black culture was creative because it had to overcome its
property status to find other means of revaluation. As slaves were traded as
both property and standard equivalence (for a certain amount of gold ounces),
as “Native trade goods—gold, slaves, pepper, ivory, native cloths, hides,
cattle and millet—were used as standards. Some European stables such as
iron bars, coppers and cloth were used,” the slave became interned in
“metamorphosis from human entity to a market one” (32–33). Revaluation,
then, required a destabilization of the relations of production in the realm of
aesthetics and sense:

in other words, the oath-taking ceremonies and subsequent

revolts were at one and the same time a form of praxis and an
abstract theoretical activity. Neither could be separated from
the other. The theory only existed in praxis; praxis was
inseparable from theory. (Wynter, n.d., 139)

The embodied experience of power located in the earth was the basis of
knowledge and the affirmation of a more exorbitant world or planetarity. The
articulation of resistance is not a romantic appeal but a structural
reorientation to the rifts of colonialism and its geosocial formations, made
through the interarticulation of the inhuman in the breaks of propertied forms
(see Davies 2015). This revaluation or reconstruction of value
deuniversalizes the effect of the language of the inhuman. In the savage New
World, the exchange was of terror, slavery, and subjugation, of barbarous
executions, disfigurement, and sadistic pleasures. That is, there was no
exchange; there was replantation and resistance in the praxis of the human
through a relation with the earth.
1800
The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, first suggested by
Crutzen (2002) and favored by social scientists, locates Anthropocene
origination in capitalist modes of economic and ecological production,
specifically its labor forms and technological innovations. This is the tale of
entrepreneurship of a few white men transforming the world with their
ingenuous creations or of a political economy that is aggressively sutured to
the earth’s processes via the lifeblood of fossil fuels. So the explorer as hero
(Columbus) is replaced by the inventor as hero (Watt and his engine) in the
progress narrative of Man as the agentic center and authority of power, cut
with some European genius myth to rarefying the white male subject and his
imperial intellectualism. Unsurprisingly, the Capitalocene, as it was quickly
redubbed, became the site of numerous investigations into the “new”
metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil
fuels, new engines, and the world as market. It relocated the Anthropocene
back to Europe, to Britain, and claimed the history of the planet from this
origination point. The revolutionary character of industrialization, as a
transformative one-way street in the production of the commodity form and
rising concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere, solidified in narratives as the
new “sire” of geologic force. What the proliferation of Anthropocene
discourse around industrialization, which I am not going to address in any
detail here, does indicate is that the Anthropocene is not reducible to
anthropogenic climate change or to a carbon or capitalist imaginary (or
capitalism as a carbon imaginary). As Povinelli (2016) warns us, the carbon
imaginary sutures us to a very particular rendering of life and death in late
liberalism, one based on the governance of life through splicing the
difference between geological and biological existence (see also Yusoff
2018). The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to
note here, particularly how this biocentrism (as per Wynter) prioritizes a
white biopolitics. As Povinelli argues, carbon imaginaries are a site of social
reproduction in the politics of knowledge—a politics that actively constructs
indigenous peoples on the outside of its paradigmatic purview.
While capitalist commodity forms and their propertied relations
undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with the production of greenhouse
gases (GHGs) through the burning vast quantities of coal, the creation of
another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine
and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its
bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put
“sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings), in those laboring workers
forging the material conversions of the revolution, the muscular energy of
slavery and capitalism become conglomerated. The new modes of material
accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and
dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery and its organization of
human property as extractable energy properties. Wynter argues that the
racism inherent in the construction of Europe was a complex part of the
apparatus by which Western capitalism (and, ipso facto, Western civilization)
fulfilled it extractive imperative and that global capitalism cannot be
understood apart from large-scale black slavery out of Africa. Rather than
slavery predating capitalist forms of labor, Wynter (n.d., 106) argues that the
interrelation of slave labor power and free labor power in sugar production
meant that the

plantation was an intrinsic and functional part of a capitalist

system which consisted of a mode of production based on free
wage labor coexisting and dependent on a mode of production
based on slave labor. . . . The plantation mode of production
was not, therefore, an anomaly within the capitalist system, it
was intrinsic to the system.

As C. L. R. James ([1938] 1989) argues in Black Jacobins, the immense

wealth from the slave trade and the Haitian sugar plantations enriched the
bourgeoisies to such an extent that they were powerful enough to set in
motion the French Revolution:

In other words both the hegemony of the Western bourgeoisie

and of capitalism were in their origin based mainly on New
World land, the forced labor of the Indian, and the conversion
of man—the black man—into a commodity. The latter large-
scale de-humanization of the European proletariat, followed on
and did not precede the total negation of the black as human.
Capitalism as a system therefore required the negation of the
black as human. Far from being an anomaly in the rational:
 system of capitalism, black slavery was rationally central to
capitalism as a system. (Wynter, n.d., 45–46, emphasis
original)

At a material level, Catherine Hall’s project Legacies of British Slave-

Ownership makes visible the complicity in terms of structures of slavery and
industrialization that organized in advance the categories of dispossession
that are already in play and historically constitute the terms of racialized
encounter of the Anthropocene. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery
in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in
“compensation” built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories),
and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire.
As the project empirically demonstrates, these legacies of colonial slavery
continue to shape contemporary Britain. A significant proportion of funds
were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham
(home of cotton production and gun manufacturing for plantations),
Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance
companies flourished and investments were made in the Great Western
Cotton Company, for example, and in cotton brokers, as well as in big
colonial land companies in Canada (Canada Land Company) and Australia
(Van Diemen’s Land Company) and a number of colonial brokers.
Investments were made in the development of metal and mineralogical
technologies: Tyne Iron Co. Iron Works; Llynvi Iron Works; Dalnotter Iron
Co.; New Shotts Iron Co.; Ynyscedwyn Iron Co.; J. J. Cordes; the Smithfield
Company; Bristol Brass Wire and Copper Co.; Pendleton Colliery; Thomas
Whitby & Co. coal, iron, and marble company; Castles and Rudgeway coal
company; Arigna Iron and Coal Mining Co.; Company for the Working of
Mines, Minerals and Metals; Port Philip and Colonial Gold Mining Co.;
Potosi La Paz and Peruvian Mining Association; Annotto Bay Mining
Association; Alpujarras Lead Co.; and Trinidad Petroleum Co. Other funds
were reinvested into Plantations Caribbean, sugar brokers and refiners,
tobacco brokers, West Indian merchants, and Dominica merchants. As a
ledger, the financial benefits of ending slavery reshaped the world to provide
the material preconditions for the Industrial Revolution and the
metamorphosis of capitalist forms. As the Legacies project evidences and
Silva (2014, 2) argues, if we pay attention to the refiguring of the commodity
in the consideration of colonial expropriation, “against the conventional view
that places slavery in the prehistory of capital,” a case can be made in this
instance for how the total value produced by slave labor continues to sustain
global capital through accumulation and legacy. In this ledger of investment
and the materialization of industrialization and empire sits an unseen,
unrecorded history withdrawn from view in the syntax of slavery that
foreshadows and reinscribes across all these relations of the globalization of
capital.
The slave–sugar–coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made
it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power (triggering a
massive spike in Britain’s population that maps directly onto its sugar and
coal production). As Marx ([1867] 1961, 760) caustically observed, “the
discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and
entombment in mines of the aboriginal population . . . the turning of Africa
into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalled the rosy
dawn of the era of capitalist production.” The slave trade, he argued, was part
of the primitive accumulation of capital that preceded and fashioned the
economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance
industries) for industrialization. Slavery and industrialization were tied by the
various afterlives of slavery in the form of indentured and carceral labor that
continued to enrich new emergent industrial powers from both the Caribbean
plantations and the antebellum South. Enslaved “free” African Americans
predominately mined coal in the corporate use of black power or the new
“industrial slavery,” as Blackman (2008) terms it. The Alabama Iron Ore and
Tennessee Coal and Iron companies were the largest convict labor companies
and fed the coal mines of the U.S. Steel Corporation, which built the country.
Blackman argues that most enslaved mine labor in the United States occurred
after the abolition of slavery in 1865 and primarily fed the industrialization of
America. The labor of the coffel—the carceral penance of the rock pile,
“breaking rocks out here and keeping on the chain gang” (Nina Simone,
Work Song, 1966), laying iron on the railroads—is the carceral future
mobilized at plantation’s end (or the “nonevent” of emancipation). As Marx
([1867] 1961, 759–60) puts it, “the veiled slavery of the wage-workers in
Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world. . . .
Capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and
dirt.” Arguably, the racial circumscription of slavery predates and prepares
the material ground for Europe and the Americas in terms of both nation and
empire building—and continues to sustain it.
1950s
While the biostratigraphic signal from colonizing the Americas remains
incompletely documented according to the AWG, the favored stratigraphic
marker by many authors, owing to its widespread and globally synchronous
signal, is the nuclear radioisotope’s from the fallout from weapons testing.
According to the AWG, the geochemical residue from the Trinity atomic
device at Alamogordo, New Mexico, detonated on July 16, 1945, is the start
of the Global Standard Stratigraphic Age (Zalasiewicz et al. 2015). Plutonium
(239,240Pu) is suggested as a good trace due to its ability to absorb into clays
and organic compounds within marine sediments and because of its mostly
artificial radionuclide suite, with a half-life of 24,110 years, that will be
detectable in sedimentary deposits for some 100,000 years into the future
(Waters et al. 2016). But as Elizabeth DeLoughrey (2013, 179) reminds us, it
is not just the environment that bears the trace of these “tests”; “the body of
every human on the planet now contains strontium90, a man-made by-
product of nuclear detonations and forensic scientists use the traces of
militarized radioactive carbon in our teeth to date human remains (as before
or after the 1954 Bravo shot).” The nuclear stratigraphic trace would mark
the more geologically dispersed events of the “Great Acceleration” of the
1950s, with its material conversions of fossil fuels; dissemination of black
carbon, inorganic and spherical carbonaceous particles, worldwide; new
geochemical compounds of polyaromatic hydrocarbons, polychlorinated
biphenyls, and pesticide residues; doubling of soil nitrogen and phosphorus
due to the Haber Bosch process of artificially producing nitrogen fertilizer;
and dispersals of new materials, such as aluminum, concrete, plastics, and
synthetic fibers. This array of material transformations and new mineral
evolutions has both transformed the balance of geochemical materials on the
earth’s surface and introduced new geological substances and forces into the
planetary mix.
Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto’s 2053[5] records a time-lapse map in a
series of blips and flashes of the nuclear explosions that have taken place
between 1945 and 1998, signaling that the test does not hold exclusive rights
to any one domain; it overflows, accumulates, and seemingly disappears, all
the while reorganizing exposures. These blips and flashes do, however, have
a black and indigenous intensification. Nuclear testing marks the
displacement and exposure of indigenous peoples in the Pacific Islands and
the radiation of Native American and Aboriginal peoples in North America
and Australia. Many islanders in the Pacific were moved and removed during
U.S. nuclear tests. Bikini Atoll, for example, was subjected to thirty years of
nuclear explosions, during which time islanders were moved to a range of
islands (to Rongerik, then to Kwajalein). Islanders in the Atolls were both
proximate to the nuclear fallout, where they were exposed to radioactive ash,
and moved to uninhabitable islands, where islanders “sucked stones” to keep
hunger at bay and starvation was common. Many returned to Bikini Island,
despite the contamination of its water sources and foodstuffs, because the
uninhabited islands to which they were moved were uninhabited for a reason.
Islanders on Rongelap and Utrok exposed by the Bravo detonation (six
islands were vaporized and fourteen left uninhabitable) were subject to
immediate radiation from the blasts and suffered visible burns, causing both
immediate and lasting epidemiological legacies and toxic intimacies with
leukemia, neoplasms, and thyroid cancers. The white powder of irradiated
coral dust that fell throughout the Atolls was dangerously radioactive. Not
recognizing this new material substance, children played in it. As Maori poet
Hone Tuwhare’s 1964 poem goes, this was “No Ordinary Sun.” The fallout
coated Marshallese bodies, ground, trees, bread fruit, coconuts, crabs, fish,
and water. This nuclear colonialism fused thermonuclear sand and poisoned
air, water, and soil, dispersing radioactive elements of strontium, cesium, and
iodine across strata and into bone in brown bodies.
After Bravo, the U.S. military waited seventy-two hours to pick up those
exposed and transport them to Kwajalein Atoll (the location of the U.S. base)
for medical examination. The 236 Marshallese were stripped naked and
sprayed down before boarding the vessel. At the army base, they were treated
as test subjects for the effects of radiation. The Bravo detonation instigated
the human experiments in Project 4.1,[6] a secret U.S. Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC) study, which was planned for and then authorized while
Marshallese were being treated on Kwajalein and continued for years to
monitor the effects of radiation on a human population. Marshallese were
subjected to unconsented medical testing, and a “cross section of happy,
amenable savages” (as the scientist in the AEC promotional film informs us)
were brought to Chicago for examination as specimens for experimentation
in a human zoo dressed up in suits “that they had to return to the U.S.
government in Hawaii.”[7] Spillers (2003, 208) suggests (on the practice of
medical experimentation on sick Negroes and the profitable “atomizing” of
diseased body parts) that “the procedures adopted for the captive flesh
demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a
living laboratory.” Women gave birth to what they called “jellyfish babies”
because of their translucent skin and soft or absent bones. There were many
congenital disorders and miscarriages. “Marshallese cancers” were some of
the highest recorded in the world. The AEC film Operation Castle narrates,
“These islands, functioning as s, gave us our first real clues to the vast area
affected by contamination from a high yield surface burst” (quoted in
DeLoughrey 2013, 171). Islanders were returned when it was known that the
island was heavily contaminated to study them as fallout “collectors” of
nuclear bombs. As Spillers (2003, 207) elucidates, the grammar of
containment in Blackness was a category mobilized to obscure and subjugate
the human in these human experiments:

The anatomical specifications of rupture, of altered human

tissue, take on the objective description of laboratory
prose. . . . These undecipherable markings on the captive body
render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe
disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin
color.

This nuclear colonialism in the Pacific and Marshall islands used a brown
strata of bodies to mitigate and absorb its geochemical shocks.
The geographies of colonial territories were key sites and subjects for the
performance of militarization and scientific development (but there is no such
thing as a nuclear “test”). As DeLoughrey (2013, 172) argues,

Western colonizers had long configured tropical islands into

the contained spaces of a laboratory, which is to say a
suppression of island history and indigenous presence. This
generation of AEC ecologists embraced nuclear testing as
creating a novel opportunity to study a complete ecosystem
through the trace of radiation. . . . An American empire of
tropical islands, circling the globe from the Pacific to the
Caribbean, became a strategic space for military
experimentation and the production of new scientific
 epistemologies like ecosystem theory.

For example, Britain exploded seven nuclear tests and seven hundred
subtests[8] on the Aboriginal land of Maralinga Tjaruta in southern Australia,
home of the Pitjantjara and Yankunytjatjara peoples, in 1956 and 1963. Many
were forcibly resettled at Yalata, but attempts to curtail access to the
Maralinga site were often unsuccessful due to strong ties to country, leading
to exposure to nuclear contamination. The first French test, Gerboise Bleue,
was conducted in February 1960, in the context of the Algerian War (1954–
62). From 1960 to 1996, France carried out 210 nuclear tests, 17 in the
Algerian Sahara and 193 in French Polynesia in the South Pacific, causing
vast swaths radioactive fallout across Polynesia. In the Anthropocene
backloop, these very islands in Polynesia and the Marshall Islands are now
subjected to rising sea levels from climate change. The Anthropocene fossil
of the waste repository in the Marshall Islands, the nuclear, forty-six-
centimeter-thick “Runit” dome of Portland cement that covers the radioactive
material from Bikini and other islands (there were forty-two tests in total on
Enewetak Atoll alone from 1948), is leaching radioactive material, causing
radionuclide migration into the marine environment. Rising sea levels and the
intensification of storm events threaten to take the islands and their nuclear-
fused strata into the sea.
The nuclear marker both commemorates a certain period of militarization
and its global dissemination and distances the impacts and responsibility for
those acts, tethering them to the Cold War and its “past” geopolitical
concerns. The dialogic relation of this Golden Spike to the politics of the
event is truncated, as it is lodged in the event of the atomic bomb and its
technological achievements rather than the effects on the peoples and
ecologies of the Pacific and the more widespread nuclear colonialism and its
ongoing presents in nuclear waste. Canada and Australia, for example, as
settler-colonial states, are the biggest extraterritorial mining countries and are
involved in the disposal and location of nuclear waste on indigenous land,
often in conflict with native title claims and predating on economic
impoverishment. The disposal of wastes mobilizes a new frontierism in the
designation of sacrifice zones within and beyond national borders that
aggregates environmental harms with anti-Blackness.
Earth Archives, Geologic Subjects, and the
Race of Strata
The continued siting or marking of indigenous territories and
intergenerational flesh of indigenous populations through the exposures of
environmental wastes—what is called environmental racism—prompts a
need to extend Achille Mbembe’s “Decolonizing Knowledge and the
Question of the Archive”[9] to explore the role of earth archives as material
deposits that maintain a colonial relation through the extractive and waste
industries, particularly through the cojoined violences of extraction practices
and their ongoing legacies of toxicity (see Bebbington and Bury 2013). For
example, in the New World silver mines of South America, where as much as
136,000 metric tons of silver were produced between 1500 and 1800 (80
percent of global production), enslaved Africans (estimated to be about 4
million) were put work in the mines, replacing indigenous slaves because
they were deemed to be better workers and more immune to diseases such as
smallpox and typhus. Spanish slavery records show that Africans were
considered essential in the operation of the mines and used them to extract
enormous wealth, particularly from the mountain of Potosi (which received
additional investment after the British 1833 slavery payout), where the
average “working” life of a miner was six to eight years (on Southern sugar
plantations, it was eight to ten years). It is estimated as many as 8 million
may have died from mining accidents, lung diseases caused by the mineral
dust, and contamination by the mercury used in processing the silver.
Nicholas Robbins (2011) argues that there was a double genocide: the initial
invasion of the New World and its impact on indigenous people, then a
second wave of genocide through silver mining and the afterlives of mercury
pollution into the soil, ecologies, and bodies of local communities.
Similarly, the uranium mining for nuclear industry exploited and polluted
Native American lands and bodies in the United States and returns in the
nuclear colonialism of waste and superfund sites, where economic poverty is
used as an exploitative means to reterritorialize land with the “by-products”
of nuclear testing (see Kuletz 1998, 126–27). Contemporaneously, the effects
of ecoimperialist measures such as REDD in the Amazon that evicted
indigenous peoples of their land in attempts to offset carbon emission created
elsewhere and the location of waste sites in low-income and predominately
black neighborhoods continue this disproportionate legacy of harm. The
imperative is to recognize the regime of offsetting—of carbon, ecosystems,
deforestation, pollution, forced migration, land grabs, climate change—as a
neocolonial enterprise that continues extraction through displacement of
waste and the ongoing legacy of colonial “experiments.” This offsetting is
achieved through the grammar of materiality that privileges equivalents
above relation. As poet Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner from the Marshall Islands says,
“these two issues—they’re so much bigger than us, nuclear issues and
climate change and yet we [the Marshall Islands] are at that crossroad”
(Laubscher 2017). In rejoinder, fellow Marshellese poet Terisa Tenei
Siagatonu claims, “Everyone is effected [sic] by climate change but some are
effected [sic] first. . . . For those of us who might not have the language but
are still able to speak, for those of us that can’t afford rent but can’t afford to
wait.”[10] Placed at the axis of environmental impacts, the language of
“dispassionate” geology betrays itself as an economy of displacement
(subjective and environmental).
As the Anthropocene names a universal geology from below, it renders a
violent homogenization of subjective affects and material possibilities. The
move toward a more expansive notion of humanity must be made with care.
It cannot be based on the presupposition that emancipation is possible once
the racial others and their voices are included finally to realize this
universality but must be based on the recognition that these “Others” are
already inscripted in the foundation formulation of the universal as a space of
privileged subjectification. Through the categories of nonbeing, trajectories
of colonial enterprise exclude the very subjects who make up the racialized
strata of extraction and exposure. This flesh gets spiked by the Anthropocene.
Thinking flesh with Spillers, as the conceptual expansion and excess of the
contraction of a person into a thing, then, “we mean its seared, divided,
ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’ over board”
(Spillers 2003, 206) muscularity. The division between body and flesh is an
essential category difference between a captive and liberated subject position.
Flesh is the “zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape
concealment under the brush of discourse or the reflexes of iconography”
(Spillers 2003, 206). The geologic claims on and in black and brown flesh
establish stratigraphic traces that are both bone deep and intergenerational,
marking bodies with nuclear radioisotopes and skin with codes of
disposability in the proximity to power and toxicity.
 Precisely because modernity (and premodernity) is secured in a
subjectivity that is inscripted at the onset in race, the diagnostic of the
Anthropocene does not unleash any ethical crisis in liberal discourse about
who is targeted by these material practices. What is at stake and what is on
the front line are defined through the color line. The disembodied monuments
and matter of the Golden Spike point but don’t name. This is why the
Anthropocene is configured in a future tense rather than in recognition of the
extinctions already undergone by black and indigenous peoples. Following in
the wake of humanism, the production of the Anthropocene is predicated on
Whiteness as the color of universality. While the ethical distinction of
humanism rests on the distinction between what is human and what is
inhuman, Blackness is established, as Mbembe argues, as the exception to
this coda, consigned to the objecthood of inhuman matter. One major
implication of Wynter’s (2015, 23) thought is that “humanness is no longer a
noun. Being human is a praxis” and cannot be taken for granted as a self-
explanatory category or reason. And human as praxis intersects with
geological classificatory practices to inform the category designations of
what is inhuman. It is this very intimacy with the life of the inhuman that the
tradition of critical black thought has engaged to resurrect the domains of life
that seem to be in excess of this objective language, which transmutes black
subjects into different categories of materiality. This is the unseen fragment
of the Anthropocene archive that needs attention, as subject and relation.
Silva (2007) argues that race is foundational rather than simply formative to
the production of global subjectivity and space; race cannot be dismantled
through acts of inclusion, because it is the building block in the modern
world system and its anchor. Furthermore, the violence of grammars of
geology must change to acknowledge this inscription and develop a mode of
writing that speaks beyond the objecthood of geologic materiality to its
inhuman and inhumane dimensions, as material praxis and subjective
condition.
If we look at the suggested natal moments of the Anthropocene, the
formative role of race in the genealogy of an Anthropocenic subject and the
set of environmental processes that accrue in the new subjective mode of
geologic force become apparent. This genealogy from Colonial Man to
Anthropocene Man is evident in the constitution of Anthropocene scientific
cultures and in the body of popular personifications of the Anthropocene. On
the front cover of the scientific journal Nature (519, no. 7542 [2015]), the
white male body of “Anthropocene Man” is pictured gently hemorrhaging
biodiversity, with an atom cloud glowing a temperate warm orange on his
shoulder. Ships crisscross the Middle Passage on his chest with the wind
beneath their sails, like hipster tattoos, and little black bodies stand on Africa
and the Americas, populating the corners of their triangular passage. The
miniature blacks are only other bodies on display, inside the peeled back skin
of white masculine modernity, posited alongside the equally sized cocoa,
maize, and wheat. A cyborgian working of industry is revealed on his arm.
The Human Epoch is blazed across his well-defined abs. Now read these
images of Anthropocene Man next to Spillers’s words: “That order
[sociopolitical order of the New World], with its human sequence written in
blood, represents for its African and indigenous peoples a scene of actual
mutilation, dismemberment and exile. First of all, their New World, diasporic
plight marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent (and unimaginable
from this distance) severing of the captive body from its motive will, its
active desire” (Spillers 2003, 206). Or take the cover of the Smithsonian
magazine. What is represented is a Western scientist surveying the geologic
bedrock, the lone liberal subject, individualized and in possession of the
horizon that he surveys as his territorial acquisition. Such imagery,
unsurprisingly, echoes with the colonial paintings that underpin this man’s
genealogy (such as the painting of Lewis and Clark’s Western Corps of
Discovery expedition 1804–6, An Evening Reading by Thomas Lorimer in
1941), where the cartographic imagination of the privileged surveyor accords
both power and truth over the territory and a benign foresight that naturalizes
the colonial gaze, reproducing and reinforcing this geopolitical conquest
within a Western claim to globalism, with resonances of “Manifest Destiny.”
Rather than offering humanity as a cohesive possibility for Anthropocene
politics, “the ‘middle passages’ of black culture to and in the New World are
not marked so much by ‘humanity’ as by an acute lack thereof; a ‘black hole’
of humanity, so to speak” (Weheliye 2002, 26). Akin to Wright’s idea of the
Middle Passage to the New World as a “big bang of blackness,” Ishamel
Reed calls it “an Atlantic of blood. Repressed energy of anger that would
form enough sun to light a solar system. A burnt-out black hole. A cosmic
slave hole” (quoted in Weheliye 2002, 21). The passage to universalism in
ecological or planetary terms without a redress of how that humanity was
borne as an exclusionary construct, coterminus with the enslavement of some
humans and the genocide of others, remains a questionable traverse.
 However, contrasting (White) posthumanism and Afro-diasporic thinking,
Weheliye (2002, 26) suggests that rather than dispensing with this category
that was invented to hide its opposite (the inhuman), black scholars have
sought to appropriate this category: “Afro-diasporic thinking has not evinced
the same sort of distrust and/or outright rejection of ‘man’ in its universalist,
post-Enlightenment guise as Western antihumanist or posthumanist
philosophies. Instead, black humanist discourses emphasize the historicity
and mutability of the ‘human’ itself, gesturing toward different, catachrestic,
conceptualizations of this category.” As King (2016, 1029) argues,
“Blackness is raw dimensionality (symbol, matter, kinetic energy) used to
make space. As space, Black bodies cannot also occupy space on human
terms.” Denied the space-time of the human, black people, King argues, must
imagine place outside of humanist configurations of geography. While this
other space-time of Blackness finds itself in the stars in Afro-futurism, there
is considerable scope to find it in the quotidian spaces of the earth.
In the Anthropocenic reinscription of earth forces and global relations,
Man is placed as a central organizing concept for planetary relations. This
Man is both a figure of address and a mode of comprehension (if not a unit of
analysis) that repositions the human in its liberal-humanist structural form at
the axis of planetary concern. The “Age of Man” is a dominant and
dominating mode of subjectification—of nature, the non-Western world,
ecologies, and the planet. As in the illustration on the cover of Nature, Man is
the body politic of global environmental change. This Man is heir apparent to
the historical formations of Colonial Man and the privileged subject of
biopolitical life. This ethical subject substantiates the hierarchies of
subjectification while simultaneously maintaining the production of
marginalities and minorities that fall outside of consideration in this secular
yet universalizing mode. As Weheliye (2014, 8) suggests,

since bare life and biopolitics discourse largely occludes race

as a critical category of analysis, as do many other current
articulations of critical theory, it cannot provide the
methodological instruments for diagnosing the tight bonds
between humanity and racializing assemblages in the modern
era. The volatile rapport between race and the human is
defined above all by two constellations: first, there exists no
portion of the modern human that is not subject to
 racialization, which determines the hierarchical ordering of
Homo Sapiens species into humans, not-quite-humans, and
nonhumans; second, as a result, humanity has held a very
different status for the traditions of the radically oppressed.
Man will only be abolished “like a face drawn in the sand at
the edge of the sea” if we disarticulate the modern human
(Man) from its twin: racializing assemblages.

The question Weheliye asks (after Wynter) in his book Habeas Viscus of
these twins—the human and racializing assemblages—is, what different
modalities of the human would come to light if the liberal-humanist figure of
Man is not taken as the master-subject? Humanity continues to persist in its
current forms of inhumanity precisely because it is a humanity that is racially
constituted and where racial difference is produced as an oppositional form
on the outside when it is really, as Silva argues through spatialized and
subjective modes, internal to the formation of such humanity. This
coterminous birth of Man and his Others forms the basis for the
enlightenment subject of ethical consideration, the subject around which an
understanding of humanity (and inhumanity) coheres (on the conatality of
liberal notions of freedom in Hegel and the organization of slavery in Haiti,
see Buck-Morss 2000). This birth codifies Whiteness with freedom and
Blackness with objectification and slavery,[11] Blackness being the position
of both the unfree and the unthought (Hartman and Wilderson 2003). And
this is precisely why Whiteness (as a formation of power) gets to “choose”
environmental conditions and black and brown are still the colors of
environmental exhaustion and the exposures to excess.
Thinking, alongside Silva, toward a global idea of race that is not at the
margins of the conceptualization of the Western ethical subject but a crucial
consideration of all its modes of spatial and subjective production would
mean the abandonment of Colonial Man, alongside a shift in the forms and
modes of expression outside of Western epistemic traditions. In the words of
Angela Last, this would be to undo geopolitics through geopoetics (Last
2015, 2017). In Last’s proposal, made through the work of Caribbean
geopoetics, “decolonization utilizes the geophysical not as a model for human
or human–world relations, but as a tool for re-situating oneself and for
reimagining global divisions” (56). This matter relation that reterritorializes
the inhuman as a geopoetic resource alerts us to the grammar of material
divisions that organize subjective modes, wherein geopolitical agency is
designated as a quality of a privileged biopolitical subject but also the
potentials for a redescription of inhuman relations. As I have argued
elsewhere, “it is the very division between ‘dead matter’ and the privileged
‘live subject’ that constitutes the active politics of recognition in late
liberalism. This axial division of materiality into passive and active forms,
that might or might not become subjects (depending on their status on the
color line), is the current bite of geopolitics” (Yusoff 2018). A new language
of the earth cannot be resolved in biopolitical modes (of inclusion) because of
the hierarchical divisions that mark the biocentric subject.
Geologizing the Social
In the context of socializing geology and geologizing the social, the
Anthropocene is but a blink in time in the deformation of the planet, but its
original claim is to render a new quality of the human. This origination and
account of geologic mastery is another “category mistake” that can only be
historically claimed if slavery and the rendering of subject as inhuman object
is discounted from the experience of the human (thereby reinforcing its
positioning outside the category of the human). The invasion of the “New
World” produced the first geologic subjects of the Anthropocene, and they
were indigenous and black. The inhuman, as both geologic property and
mode of subjective relation in chattel slavery, rendered a coercive
interpenetration between human and inhuman categories, or what Spillers
calls an “alien intimacy” that predates the “new” imagined subject of the
Anthropocene. Rather, diaspora was a social sedimentation that names the
violence of geology in its inception, not as an overlooked aspect of spatial
and environmental relation that can be subsequently claimed as mastery over
nature and geologic force but as one that is more properly located in the
grammar of geologic determinism established in genocide and the master–
slave relation. This master–slave relation is initiated through the geologic
praxis of extraction that required both slavery (first for mining) and its
continuance as a mode of labor and psychic extraction of pleasure and
sadism, which in turn codified Blackness in proximity to the qualities and
properties of the inhuman. Defining an identity for an epoch through the
geologizing of the social (and its modes of subjective relation), the origin
stories of the Anthropocene construct a monolithic, post-racial “we” and
singular temporality of being instead of differentiating geologic life along this
praxis. Humanism is deployed as a method of erasure that obfuscates climate
racism and social injustice in access to geography through differentiated
histories of responsibilities and reward in geologic life (see Yusoff 2016, 6).
Wynter (2015, 24), discussing the formulation of the homogenized “we,”
suggests that this referent “is not the referent-we of the human species itself”;
rather, it is isomorphic in its privileged subjectivity to the “we” of humanity.
As Wynter goes on to suggest,

as natural scientists and also bourgeois subjects, logically

 assume that the referent-we—whose normal behaviors are
destroying the habitability of our planet—is that of the human
population as a whole. The “we” who are destroying the
planet in these findings are not understood as the referent-we
of homo oeconomicus (a “we” that includes
themselves/ourselves as bourgeois academics). Therefore, the
proposals that they’re going to give for change are going to be
devastating! And most devastating of all for the global poor,
who have already begun to pay the greatest price. . . .
Devastating, because the proposals made, if nonconsciously
so, are made from the perspective of homo oeconomicus and
its attendant master discipline of economics. (24; emphasis
original)

The assertion of this unity across time and space erases the very racialized
ruptures and geosocial rifts that brought this Anthropocenic world into being
through the stratification of flesh. As Toni Morrison (1992, 46) suggests, “the
world does not become raceless or will not become unracialized by assertion.
The act of enforcing racelessness in literary discourse is itself a racial act.”
The birth of racial subject is tied to colonialism and the conquest of space and
the codification of geology as property and properties. Thereby geologic
resources and bodily resources (or racialized slavery) share a natal moment.
Challenging the celebration of those histories that produce mythic
accounts, underpinned by Western geologic modes of extraction and White
Imperialism, is a way to challenge not just the narration of geology but where
and how we might look for its marks in a decolonizing mode of geologic
relation. Undoing what Hortense Spillers calls “grammars of capture” is a
way to unearth how geology moves through Blackness rather than simply
against it. That is to suggest that other material relations emerge through this
deformation of subjective life. Originary moments, told as the event of
geology, can be thought about as “interstitial—those punctualities (in a linked
series of events) that go unmarked so that the mythic view remains
undisturbed” (Spillers 2003, 14). In other words, origin stories bury as much
as they reveal about material relations and their genealogies. And there is a
need to desediment the social life of geology, to place it in the terror of its
coercive acts and the interstitial moments of its shadow geology—what I call
a billion Black Anthropocenes.
 Let’s imagine for a moment, in the realm of a more exuberant and exacting
social geology, that the Golden Spike is something that spikes or impales,
that there is a flesh that underwrites this geology (human, nonhuman,
inhuman). This corporeality is a way to visualize, to render sensible, to
redress the social context and a contextual outside to that geology (where
geology is never a formation only of materiality but also of time, and species
and its twin race, explanation, and future politics). This contextual outside
might be called the geotrauma of the Anthropocene’s realization—a
geotrauma where flesh is the medium of exchange that organizes and
modifies the Spike. Geologic relations are always material relations of power,
relations that are constituted through their passage, and it is a passage of
resistance. Akin to the genre of colonial paintings in which the geographic
surveyor plots a territory, those lines on a map and the collections of mineral
artifacts they enable have consequences; they establish unfolding geo-logics,
for particular bodies and subject positions, as disposable in the shadow
economy of extraction.
Naming a Spike is not just scientific triumphalism but enacts and then
describes a structure and emphasis of attention or monumentalization. These
Golden Spikes are both cultural edifices of political geology and monuments
to extractive–racialized–industrialized complexes. What these nominations
are naming, albeit obscured in the narration, is a story about the very bodies
that undo strata—the theft of bodies, of the flesh that hews the rock, that
plants the sugar plantation, that blasts and gets blasted in the mines, that
transports and carries the pathogens and pollutions of those Spikes as
processes of destratifications. These subjective and material actualizations of
the Anthropocene are geographies of violent coercion. There is an invisible
agent that carries those Golden Spikes, in their flesh, chains, hunger, and
bone, and in their social formations as sound, radical poetry, critical black
studies, and subjective possibility realized against impossible conditions;
there are a billion Black Anthropocenes that are its experiential witness and
embody its modes of mattering that have no resource to the agency of history,
only to being historicized in this -cene. Thus to organize a Golden Spike
repressing those geologic relations that have carried it socially is to reproduce
the ongoing violence of those relations. I want to think about the impaled
flesh while maintaining an attention to the refusal to reproduce that racial
violence as the only possible position of Blackness thereby producing
Blackness and Indigeneity as a negative dialectic to White Geology.
 The Golden Spike is not an abstract spike; it is an inhuman instantiation
that touches and ablates human and nonhuman flesh, inhuman materials and
experiences. It rides through the bodies of a thousand million cells; it bleeds
though the open exposure of toxicity, suturing deadening accumulations
through many a genealogy and geology. This is the alienation of geology.
The fabulation of beginnings in the Anthropocene is tied to the present and its
politics, but it also places emphasis on the certain continuities that structure
experience from the vantage point of Western colonialism and its ongoing
colonial present. Subjects, or rather, modes of subjugation, are also tethered
to that event and get erased—modes that continue to reproduce themselves
through racialized capitalism in the mines in South Africa and Brazil, right
through to the ways in which nuclear fallout is again congressing around the
island of Guam, or in the legacies of slavery through incarceration. Because
all the proffered Golden Spikes impale flesh, they are sites of violence
enacted on the integrity of subjectivity, corporeality, and territoriality.
Origination is displacement. Each moment of the proposed origin stories of
the Anthropocene is as colonial displacement, a migration through events that
is disproportionally harbored by people of color and indigenous communities.
In the spirit of a speculative geology, which the Anthropocene surely is,
given its geology-in-the-making and future-oriented explications, considering
a fuller social geology would make for a more precise inhuman geology that
also addresses the constitutive exclusions of its inhumanity.
Paying attention to the quotidian inhuman social geologies that underpin
these geologic acts of spiking would enact a far more revolutionary paradigm
shift in the geographies of the Anthropocene. The centrality of race to the
production of humanity in the Anthropocene requires a reconfiguration of the
subject at the center of white liberal ethical accounts and an acknowledgment
of the role of race in the production of the global spaces that constitute the
Anthropocene. I want to make several propositions about the inscription of
coloniality into the Anthropocene:

1. Anthropocenic discourse enacts a foundational global inscription of race

in the conception of humanity that is put forth as an object of concern in
the Anthropocene. Moving toward the idea of a billion Black
Anthropocenes spotlights that which is already centered in the
Anthropocene—race—and would refuse the structural Whiteness of the
Anthropocene in its current formation, potentially toward other, more
 accountable, decolonized, geosocial futures. This is why the formulation
is (after Silva) toward the idea of a billion Black Anthropocenes and not
posed as an alter-cene, in any of its guises as Capitalocene, Chulthocene,
Plantationocene, and so on. An idea of a Black Anthropocene poses the
question as a redescription of the Anthropocene through the racializing
assemblage from which it emerged, rather than claiming a space for
Blackness within or outside the Anthropocene (which it is not my place
to do precisely because of the colonial histories that have scripted and
described the terms of Blackness). This would be to acknowledge how
the pursuit of geology made race a technology at its inception. In
making the suggestion of an idea of Black Anthropocenes, I am not
advocating ontological differentiation as a supplement to Western
knowledge practices of modernity to “unsettle” them, or as a corrective
lens upon them, to “appropriate non-hegemonic positions for . . . white
introspection” (Broeck and Junker 2014, 10). There can be no address of
the planetary failures of modernism or its master-subject, Man, without
a commitment to overcoming extractive colonialism. Attending to the
economy of flesh that underpins geologic practices is to attend to an
ongoing moment of origination and natal alienation, a geophysics of
flesh that is Black and Brown.
2. A material and temporal solidarity exists between the inscriptions of
race in the Anthropocene and the current descriptions of subjects that are
caught between the hardening of geopolitical borders and the material
destratification of territory. McKittrick argues that “we might re-imagine
geographies of dispossession and racial violence not through the
comfortable lenses of insides/outsides or us/them, which repeat what
Gilmore (2007, 241) calls ‘doomed methods of analysis and action,’ but
as sites through which ‘co-operative human efforts’ can take place and
have a place” (McKittrick 2011, 960). These Anthropocene sites in
which various forms of fossilization are being enacted—mining,
extraction, waste, extinction—are all geosocial sites of coproduction in
which shared histories unfold within deeply unequal power relations.
Within this context, the practices that constitute the contemporary
Anthropocene-in-the-making and its stratifications are a product of, and
reinforce, colonial divisions of power, territory, and life. Decolonization
matters precisely at this moment because there is a parallel
deterritorialization of material environments because of Anthropocenic
 processes that are compounding the (ongoing) displacement of
indigenous peoples (such as in the Arctic, the Pacific, and the Marshall
Islands).
3. Judith Butler (2015, 12) describes ethics as a relational description: “The
ethical does not primarily describe conduct or disposition, but
characterizes a way of understanding the relational framework within
which sense, action, and speech become possible [a space of discourse].
The ethical describes a structure of address in which we are called upon
to act or to respond in a specific way.” The ethical structure of address
enacted in Anthropocene discourse should not be about a morality tale
of a good or bad Anthropocene (such as that put forward by
ecomodernists) but about the relational redescription of the racial
mattering and spatial practices within and through geologic relations
(i.e., geology and geologic force need to be posed in all their territorial
implications and subjective modes). The consecration of the “event” of
geology needs to be placed in its proper historic material and symbolic
relation to permanently destabilize the geologic monuments of the
Anthropocene and their version of historicizing planetary relations. In a
broader geontological frame, this would elucidate the fantasy of origins
and the sedimentation of those stories as a structural axis of territorial
belonging and subjective power. If, according to Hartman (2003, 185),
“the slave occupies the position of the unthought,” then the slave also
represents geology’s afterthought, insomuch as the thirst for geologic
materials unleashed certain notions of what and who could be a subject
(and in parallel, what and who could be inhuman as both property and
possessing valuable properties to be extracted). From the position of the
unthought, Hartman asks, “What does it mean to try to bring that
position into view without making it a locus of positive value, or without
trying to fill the void” (185), without trying to integrate the position into
a project founded on anti-Blackness and “investment in certain notions
of the subject and subjection” (185)? The Anthropocene is a project
initiated and executed through anti-Blackness and inhuman subjective
modes, from 1492 to the present, and it cannot have any resolution
through individuated liberal modes of subjectivity and subjugation. In
short, that world must end for another relation to the earth to begin.

In the skin of a differently narrated geology, we get a broken event, subjects

that have emerged through and in that break (to paraphrase Fred Moten) and
survived despite the genocidal rage directed at them (which goes way beyond
the harnessing of surplus value). Then, we have a billion Black
Anthropocenes, an “Undercommons” in Moten’s and Harney’s words, that
already has its own Poethical tradition (in Silva’s words, that has a different
matter relation). It is a different origin story that has never had the luxury of
origins, a “nonoriginal origin” in Sexton’s (2010, 41) words. This absent
present in the narrative arc of the story of the “Geology of Mankind” is
fractured all the way down its fault lines, through the rocks and the earth.
Rifted, it has borne the mobilization and militarization of the strata and has
lived the Anthropocene as a condition of survival. To quote Moten (2003,
14), “it’s the ongoing event of an antiorigin and an anteorigin, replay and
reverb of an impossible natal occasion . . . that (dis)establishes genesis.”
Epochal thinking requires shattering its colonial legacy and the articulation of
the fragmentary effects of its ruptures on the “wretched of the earth” (Fanon
1963):

My name is Bordeaux and Nates and Liverpool and New York and
San Francisco
not a corner of this world but carries my thumb-print
and my heel-mark on the backs of skyscrapers and my dirt (Césaire
[1956] 1969, 29–30)

Césaire continues, naming the geologies of racialized earth, concluding,

Red earth, blood earth, blood brother earth (29–30)

 The Inhumanities
To produce Blackness is to produce a social link of subjection and
a body of extraction, that is, a body entirely exposed to the will of
the master, a body from which great effort is made to extract
maximum profit. An exploitable object . . .
—ACHILLE MBEMBE, A Critique of Black Reason

If we plumb the depths, then what we will find is fundamentally

black . . . [it is] a process of disalienation. . . . I felt that beneath the
social being would be found a profound being, over whom all sorts
of ancestral layers and alluviums had been deposited.
—AIMÉ CÉSAIRE, Discourse on Colonialism

Questions of origin are never too far away from questions of difference and
belonging and the various bifurcations of the human into its subcategories of
fully human, subhuman, and inhuman. Origins also nurture; they grow an
armature for narratives; they root a set of emplacements or belongings into
place. Origins are like the importation of flora and fauna that settlers brought
with them to remake their home. The unsettled had to negotiate origins, too
(the voiding of origins that the Middle Passage initiated), making home in no
home, taking root, a “replantation” (Wynter, n.d.) in a slave plot, where
growing things is both a narrative and biophysical act. The natal alienation
that is established through the inscription of the inhuman as a subject position
within slavery and the dispossession of land that renders the indigenous as
subhuman has consequences for how lineage is inscribed in territory and
legitimating rights are established over that territory. The inheritance of ideal
subjecthood that is tied to material accumulation vis-à-vis the white
patriarchal family continues in the present (Sharpe 2016b). As Hartman
(2003) comments, “family values support a eugenics agenda—the
reconstitution of the white bourgeois family” (196) where “racial domination
and racial abjection are produced across generations” (198). The genealogical
arrangements that are used to understand the architecture of Anthropocene
origin stories have consequences for the contemporary politics of place. As
Brand (2001, 64) argues, “country, nation, these concepts are of course
deeply indebted to origins, family, tradition, home. Nation-states are
configurations of origins as exclusionary power structures which have
legitimacy based solely on conquest and acquisition.” The manufacturing of
origins is a need and tyranny of the nation, which is predicated on extraction
and exploitation. Black and brown death is the precondition of every
Anthropocene origin story, and the grammar and graphia of this geology
compose a regime for producing contemporary subjects and subtending
settler colonialism. Thus Anthropocene origin stories are broadly concerned
not just with geological markers but with a genealogy that inscribes a
historicity onto the planet and thereby constitutes the filiation of what and
who gets to constitute the historical event.
Origins are not solely about geography. They pertain to the question of
how matter is understood and organized, as both extractable resource and
energy, mobilized through dehumanizing modes of subjection and conjoining
the property and properties of matter in such a way that it collapses the body
politic of Blackness into the inhuman—wherein a codification in law and
labor becomes an epidemiological signature, as Blackness is marked as
property and Whiteness is marked as freedom (political and geographical).
This transaction is executed in geologic codes of materiality. As Hartman
(1997, 115) argues, “the longstanding and ultimate affiliation of liberty and
bondage made it impossible to envision freedom independent of constraint or
personhood and autonomy separate from the society of property and
proprietorial notions of self.” Destabilizing the origin (and originality in
general) counters the social reproduction of the relation of race that is
established through this geologic ordering of property and proprietorial
subjectivity. Slavery provided a “natural” ordering principle in the technē of
race (Hartman 1997, 121), and Geology’s discriminatory classificatory
system of property and properties no less participated in the transformation of
land relations and extractive economies—a geometry of power that executed
dispossession and displacement under the rubric of extraction. The
metamorphosis is of geology into slavery or “chattel into man” (Hartman
1997, 111).
While the roles of “natural categories” of race, blood, racial taxonomies of
eugenics, and environmental determinism have been critically denaturalized,
geology remains stubbornly resilient in maintaining its inhuman categories of
metal, gold, mud, slave, earth, Carib. The inscription of geologic principles in
the founding narrative of the colonial state, in terms of the colonization of
both resources and racialized belonging, encodes the brutal calculative logic
of inhuman materiality as a praxis for dispossession that only later acquires
its ideological forms, such as “Manifest Destiny.” There is a parallel between
the languages of the dispossession of subjects and land within the context of
the inhuman (and its inhumanities). There was a reliance on both the fixity of
geologic description to facilitate exchange (gold, slave, Gold Coast) and its
porosity, which enabled a range of different materials to be mobilized within
a single system despite differences in sentience, location, and affiliation. In
this chapter, I explore the structural antagonisms in the designation of the
inhuman in its double sense (as material experience and epistemic “category
mistake”) and the resistances and refusals in response to this mineralogical
intimacy.
Categories of Matter
Geology is a category and praxis of dispossession. It has determined the
geographies and genealogies of colonial extraction in a double sense: first, in
terms of settler colonialism and the thirst for land and minerals, and second,
as a category of the inhuman that transformed persons into things. This pincer
movement of geology displaces territory as earth and the territory of
subjective possession. This is the filiation of “red earth, blood earth, blood
brother earth.”
Geology as the Space of Transaction
Laws of property a. a thing belonging to someone, things, belonging,
goods, chattels. b. an attribute, quality or characteristic of
something.

Property Relations
Slave capture and ownership were initially instigated to mine for gold in the
New World. Both enslaved, land and ecologies became subject to encoding
as inhuman property, as a tactic of empire and European world building.
Gold and silver extracted from mines in the Americas flowed to buoy up
European markets. The property lines of empire instigated and marked
Blackness as both a consequence of labor requirements and a possibility of
capital accumulation through geologic extraction. As Wilderson suggests,
“one could say that the possibility of becoming property is one of the
essential elements that draws the line between blackness and whiteness”
(quoted in Hartman 2003, 188). The historic confluence of the science of
recognition, identification, and extraction of geologic materials and the
establishment of a color line that policed the border in claims to human
freedom organized the language of geology beyond the realms of a material
science. As Catherine Hall (2014, 28) puts it, “black racial identity marked
those who were enslaved. White marked those who were free.” Blackness
was named as a property of “natal alienation” (which is also genealogical and
geographical isolation) and its continuance in social and sexual orders
through the enclosure of property relations across all binds of relation. It

had its counterpoint in the naming of whiteness as a different

kind of property—access to public and private privileges, the
possibility of controlling critical aspects of one’s own life
rather than being the object of others’ domination. A set of
assumptions, privileges and benefits were attached to being
white in colonial society that became legitimated, affirmed
and protected by law. (28)

Blackness was a legal code and an epidemiological mode of identification

that fixed a body politic of Blackness as transportable property to be
continuously dis-placed across different geographies and psychic registers
across the “door of no return” (Brand 2001; Hartman 2007). Moreover,
Whiteness became established as a right to geography, to take place, to
traverse the globe and to extract from cultural, corporeal, and material
registers.
While the accumulation from planter capital was one register of extraction,
the accumulation from the violence of taking place across multiple registers
of belonging was another. The very fungiblity of the commodity allowed
Blackness to become mobilized as an ontological possibility within inhuman
categories, but conversely, the carceral logic of geologic grammars renders
Blackness as flesh, matter, and subject position. The fantasy was to assert
commodity value of persons through the rendering of a nonagentic
materiality (flesh) to generate surplus value, thereby disfiguring the black
subject. Hartman argues that the slave is the essential subject as object, an
object to whom anything can be done. The first step in this process of
dehumanization is the metamorphosis of human into inhuman thing. The
discipline of geology is intrinsic to this structural inscription of subjects into
matter-objects or property. Compartmentalization and categorization of
matter produce the fungibility of the slave as “thing” and the grammar of
“thingification.” In a Kentucky slave pen, reconstructed in the National
Underground Railroad Freedom Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, an iron ring
hangs from the central beam, the one feature in an otherwise empty space. A
video playing outside says that the iron ring was “the only human thing in
there.” The ring formed by a human hand from the inhuman earth, beaten into
shape in the forge, maintained in violence by free human hands, hooked so
many into inhuman bondage—a bondage that ricochets across the Middle
Passage, through so many inhumanities, in infinite arrears. “Here, walls ate
skin, footsteps took the mind” (Brand 2001, 224). This fungibility, Hartman
argues, is both the breach in natal possibility that leaves subjects unable to
access any positionality outside of the codification of Blackness as inhuman
property and what organizes the possibility of the interchangeable exchange
as a set of properties.

Properties
Both the enslaved and minerals are recognized as possessing certain
properties or qualities, namely, energy, reproducibility, and transformation.
As Hartman (1997, 26) argues, “the fungibility of the commodity,
specifically its abstractness and immateriality, enabled the black body or
blackface mask to serve as the vehicle of white self-exploration, renunciation,
and enjoyment.” The properties of the enslaved “are ontologized as the innate
capacities” of the slave property (26). These innate capacities are properties
to be worked and channeled, likened to the band of iron that made the ring
that held the slaves. These properties for extraction and labor are also tied to
the social reproduction of Whiteness; through forced reproduction and rape
of the enslaved (or, in Hartman’s words, subjection to desire without
consent); and in the use of extracted energy for generating the organization of
economies of valuation. The instigation of slavery was prompted by a
recognition of the so-called properties of African physiology, where
indigenous Indians were viewed as not robust enough for mining and
plantation work. What is apparent is that the slave and the mineral are
recognized in regimes of value, but only so much as they await extraction
(where Whiteness is the arbiter and owner of value).
Both these modes of extracting value—as property and properties—
generate surplus. It is the grammar of geology—the inhuman—that
establishes the stability of the object of property for extraction. The process
of geologic materialization in the making of matter as value is transferred
onto subjects and transmutes those subjects through a material and color
economy that is organized as ontologically different from the human (who is
accorded agency in the pursuits of rights, freedom, and property). The
codification of Blackness through the inhuman meant that “there was no
relation to blackness outside the terms of this use of, entitlement to, and
occupation of the captive body, for even the status of free blacks was shaped
and compromised by the existence of slavery” (Hartman 1997, 24). While
Hartman argues that property was how the color line was drawn, what is
important about her argument is the way in which she demonstrates how the
black body becomes a “property of enjoyment” as well as of labor, violence,
energy, and so on. The actual body of the slave as an object of identification
is always being made to disappear, whether through the optics of pleasure,
empathy, or violence, in much the same way as the black or brown body does
in the “point and erase” stories of the Anthropocene.
Thus geology was ontologically configured long before the pronouncement
of the Anthropocene that designates a “new” geologic identity for humanity.
Identification of properties of value and the recognition of property relations
to substantiate that theft were the primary drivers of profitability in the
colonial context. At the heart of this enterprise was geology as an
epistemological discipline and a technology for extraction, settlement, and
displacement. The organization of matter and subjects within descriptions
that served as a mode of containment produced the very idea of a standing
stock of gold, energy, and slaves, organized, as they were, as concomitant
categories on a bill of sale. Blackness is rendered as an empty signifier, like
gold, silver, and other precious minerals, where the valuation of exchange is
established through descriptive markers and subjects are considered as a set
of properties (exchange value = type [sex, size, age] + properties [skill, future
surplus]). Rights of property are established as a configuration of what is
identifiable as value and a mode of possession. As Spillers (2003, 208)
argues, “the captive body, then, brings into focus a gathering of social
realities as well as a metaphor for value so thoroughly interwoven in their
literal and figurative emphases that distinctions between them are virtually
useless.” Objectification is enacted to deaden subjectivity (and relationality to
place). This is how the inhuman as a mode of categorization and a monstrous
attitude toward the enslaved contains, regulates, and subjugates bodies. The
classification of the inhuman as inert, ahistorical, nonpolitical, inorganic, is
both a division of matter that is biopolitical and a regime of ordering matter
that separates spheres of politics and agency—or, biopolitics achieved
through geologic means.
Who then is objectified by geology’s grammar of materiality? Who are its
social subjects and kin? What is the ground and relation of these subjects to
the earth? Noticing the slide between persons and materials that are
consigned to the category of inhuman is not to dispossess further those that
have been rendered as inhuman in that configuration; rather, it is to
understand the slide between categories and its resistance. Understanding the
instability of the category of the inhuman and its stickiness to abject forms of
subjecthood opens an examination into how these attachments were
facilitated (and continue to be facilitated). Recognizing how the inhuman
slips, how the inhuman is made to slide over personhood as a process of
making the subjugated (as in the black body rendered as flesh and units of
energy), is an unrecognized dynamic of geologic life that rewrites a radically
different text for the Anthropocene.
While rewriting the Anthropocene is not of central importance in and of
itself (i.e., as an epistemic exercise), the modes of geologic subjectivity that
are imagined, and the relation of these ideas of geologic subjectivity to
regimes of extraction, are. Understanding how modes of subjectivity are
established as categories of extraction is a historic shift in the narrative of
world making and a redress of how modes of subjectivity are formed in
relation to one another (i.e., the making of chattel as an indifferent category
of subject description is tied to the possibility of the possessive liberal
individual and white patriarchal family). It is only at the level of the symbolic
that the substitutions between Black and Gold can be mobilized as material
registers that travel across a monolithic ground. Only through a shift of the
axis of sense that allows this transaction (at a material and symbolic level)
can a different possibility be enacted to trouble this geophysics predicated on
the deformation of brown and black bodies. Looked at through the lens of
geology and slavery, the descriptive opacity of the Anthropocene as a
reckoning with geologic relations seems disingenuous. For the displacement
from land and ecologic relation that form the possibility of place are covered
over, and subjective life is tied to the instigation of chattel slavery (which is
coded in parallel with material extraction). It is the very codes and grades of
inhuman matter as they are generically applied to minerals that become
reconstituted in the generic slave codes (of property and properties). While
the recognition of material properties of colonized land in terms of
extractable properties drives the colonial imperative and its need for slave
labor, the slave becomes an effect of that extractive grammar and its
embodiment and resistance.
In twining the traffic between the inhuman and inhumane, the presumed
neutrality of geology as a mode of description is disrupted. Blackness is
displaced and effaced in the pursuit of value for Western colonialism through
and as extraction. Geologic principles are used to establish a biocentrism that
delineates from the human to subhuman to inhuman, as a property relation
and as a mark of agentic properties. It is not that geology is productive of
race per se but that empirical processes mesh across geological propositions
and propositions of racial identity to produce an equation of inhuman
property as racially coded. This dynamic of disinheritance (and white
inheritance) is ideologically maintained through the notions of species in
geologic time. As Fanon (1963, 39) argued, “this world divided into
compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species. . . .
When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that
what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not
belonging to a given race, a given species.” It is equally true that the optics of
belonging to a given race is the technē of origination that is invented to parcel
out the earth.
“The Principles of Geology”
Sir Charles Lyell, president of the Geological Society of London and author
of The Principles of Geology (a text that directly informed Darwin’s ideas of
evolution), makes clear the ways in which geology and racial propositions are
intertwined in his published accounts of his geologic surveying of North
America (Lyell 1845, 1849). Eclectic in a manner that must have been
familiar to his audiences, he moves in between “Geology and Cretaceous
strata” and “Montgomery. Curfew. Sunday School for Negros” in one chapter
(chapter XXII) and “Distinct Table for Coloured and White Passengers” and
“Fossil Shells” (Lyell 1849, chapter XXIII) in another. The ledger for chapter
IX reads, “Return to Charleston—Fossil Human Skeleton—Species of Shells
common to Eocene Strata in America and Europe—Condition of Slave
Population—Cheerfulness of the Negroes: their Vanity—State of Animal
Existence—Invalidity of marriages—The Coloured Population multiply
faster than the Whites—Effects of the interference of Abolitionists.” Lyell’s
speculations on race are firmly underpinned by the language he has forged
for geology, as he defines the problems of the races and their respective (as
he understands them) positions in relation to time, in much the same way as
his descriptions of geology define the stratification of rock formations and
species in time. That is, the Negro is understood by Lyell as a different
species in time than “the White.” Notwithstanding his concerns over the
population growth of Negroes and the subsequent effect on the white race,
both racially and economically, Lyell (1849, 95) suggests, “I shall cherish the
most sanguine hopes of their future improvement and emancipation, and even
their ultimate amalgamation and fusion with the whites, so highly has my
estimate of their moral and intellectual capabilities been raised by what I have
lately seen in Georgia and Alabama.” While Lyell’s paternalist opinion seems
to have been bolstered by an invigorating sermon in a Negro church, where
he praises the lyricism of the Negroes and how they have embraced his
understanding of moral progress, his representation of the problem of the race
is directly informed by his account of the principles of geology (and the
notion of improvement and gradualism that framed his account of geologic
formations). As the table of contents attests, he sees no difference in the
crossings between social and geologic strata with regard to the language of
property and possibility across fossil objects and Negroes.
 On the question of emancipation, Lyell quotes an advocate from the North,
reasoning that if emancipation were not granted, then the Negro population
would grow to outnumber the White population. He says, “But would not the
progress of the whites be retarded, and our race deteriorated, nearly in the
same proportion as the negroes would gain? Why not consider the interests of
the white race by hastening the abolition of slavery. The whites constitute
nearly six-sevenths of our whole population. As a philanthropist, you are
bound to look at the greatest good of the two races collectively” (Lyell 1849,
101). More than a hundred years later, James Baldwin debates at Cambridge
University Union with the conservative right-wing author William F.
Buckley on a motion that is both the child of this question of the progress of
Whites and its inversion: “Has the American Dream been achieved at the
expense of the American Negro?” In his statement, Baldwin exposes the
hypocrisies of liberalism and tears apart the notion of progress when one-
ninth of the population is excluded. Toward the end of his speech, Baldwin
declared that until it was accepted that “I am not a ward of America,” a
subject of pity and charity, but instead that “I am one of the people who built
the country—until this moment comes there is scarcely any hope for the
American dream.”[1] What Lyell addresses as the issue of progress, as a
system of reality that is produced through a temporal geologic formulation,
Baldwin is still challenging a century later.
Lyell (1845) states the social work of temporal formations explicitly when
he says, “To inspire them with an aptitude for rapid advancement must be the
work of time—the result of improvement carried on through several
successive generations. Time is precisely the condition for which the
advocates of the immediate liberation of the blacks would never sufficiently
allow” (191–92, emphasis added). Employing the notion of “Times Arrow”
(later made famous by another geologist, Stephen Jay Gould), Lyell makes
the symbolic offering of time and its possibilities for freedom and then
represses that possibility through a generational requirement, so that
Blackness is always belated in time and therefore never fully now and
human. Wright suggests that “the tendency to misread this Blackness as a
‘what’ imposes even more the fixity so that Blackness, as a vaguely
biological ‘what’ takes on an eerie resemblance to those anti-Black
discourses that first claimed Blacks were indeed a ‘what’—a distinct
subspecies ‘marked by nature,’ as Jefferson opined” (Wright 2015, 25). The
“what” of Blackness was rendered through the lexicon of the inhuman. Only
geologic time, according to Lyell, would allow for the transformation of what
into who.
As in answer to the legacy of Lyell’s thinking and its multiple
manifestations through the generations of the Jim Crow era, Baldwin, in the
1989 documentary The Price of a Ticket, challenges the idea that racial
progress needs to “take time.” He says, “What is it you want me to reconcile
myself to? I was born here nearly sixty years ago, I’m not going to live
another sixty years, you always tell me it takes time. It’s taken my father’s
time, my mother’s time, my uncle’s, my brother’s and my sister’s time, my
niece’s and my nephew’s time, how much time do you want for your
progress? The cut with which Baldwin spits out the word progress is clean to
the bone. Nina Simone sings it in ‘Mississippi Goddam’ (1964), in response
to the murder of Medgar Evans and the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing
in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four black children, ‘Too slow’; ‘Keep
on sayin’ ‘go slow.’ . . . to do things gradually would bring more tragedy.
Why don’t you see it? Why don’t you feel it? I don’t know, I don’t know.
You don’t have to live next to me, just give me my equality!” As Mbembe
(2017, 17) argues, “the notion of race made it possible to represent non-
European human groups as trapped in a lesser form of being. They were the
impoverished reflection of the ideal man, separated from him by an
insurmountable temporal divide, a difference nearly impossible to
overcome.” Locked into a belatedness in becoming human enough in relation
to the ideal (white) humanist subject, the spatializing of time along a vertical
line is used as a mechanism to deny juridical rights, wherein Whiteness
becomes the achievement of one’s temporal identity in geologic time.
In the presumption of what needs to be explained about slavery, a
geohistorical horizon is established into which questions of race and
possibility are staged as self-evidently differentiated in time, to justify
subjection and material dispossession (from intimate kin and sexual relations
to the ownership of land). Lyell’s whimsical speculations point to how these
geological underpinnings of the rubric of property, paternalism, and moral
economy establish modes of subjectification as thoroughly sedimented in the
bedrock of geology and its categorizing of fossil objects in time. The figure
of the Negro is the substantive subject of this historicization that figures the
question of race within and through geological classifications and its
descriptive modes of extractive preconfiguration. The construction of the
human as such, as it pertains to origins, is divided along with geologic strata
into White and Negro as part of the differentiating discourse of race and time,
in which Whiteness signals arrival and Blackness belatedness. Lyell (1845,
191) says,

I am by no means disposed to assume that the natural

capacities of the negroes, who always appeared to me to be an
amiable, gentle, and inoffensive race, may not be equal in a
moral and intellectual point of view to those of the Europeans,
provided the coloured population were placed in
circumstances equally favourable for their development. But it
would be visionary to expect that, under any imaginable
system, this race could at once acquire as much energy, and
become as rapidly progressive, as the Anglo-Saxons.

When Lyell tries to justify this carceral lacuna in time, he comes up with a
transcendental categorical distinction across generations, where the
teleological principles of thought take a presumption of the “unimaginable”
as a principle. Yet, there is a slippage in this description of the unimaginable
acquisition of “as much energy” which allows progression, in that it names
the theft of energy that is slavery as the propulsion of white evolutionary
achievement. As a slow converter to the idea of the transmutation of the
species through Darwin’s concept of natural selection, Lyell was suspicious
of the possibility for change, preferring to see the relations between races (as
with geology) as defined by gradual transformation and the impact of
favorable conditions (understood by him as both social and climatic).
Geology becomes a way to frame the unfolding progression of liberal
teleology. He says,

They cannot be fused at once into the general mass, and

become amalgamated with the whites, for their colour still
remains as the badge of their former bondage, so that they
continue, after their fetters are removed, to form a separate
and inferior caste. How long this state of things would last
must depend on their natural capabilities, moral, intellectual,
and physical; but if in these they be equal to whites, they
would eventually become the dominant race, since the climate
of the south, more congenial to their constitutions, would give
 them decided advantage. (193)

In Lyell’s reasoning, Blackness was a monolith that was separated from

Whiteness through metaphors of value that are complicated by
understandings of the biologic determinism through climate (as a racialized
construction). Again, there is the slippage between the categorization of
property and its effects and the role of “natural” properties that determine (in
Lyell’s mind) the environmental possibilities of evolution, and thus a risk to
white society. The epistemic violence is doubly enacted: “it touches
generations of social formations both over time (transhistorical and
memorial) and in time (historical and material)” (Spillers 2003, xiii). Lyell’s
comments reveal the affective infrastructures that travel under scientific
reason that privileges white comfort (“anxiety”) over black pain:

Had the white man never interposed to transplant the negro

into the New World, the most generous asserters of the
liberties of the coloured race would have conceded that Africa
afforded space enough for their development. Neither in their
new country, nor in that of their origin, whether in a condition
of slavery or freedom, have they as yet exhibited such superior
qualities and virtues as to make us anxious. (Lyell 1845, 195,
emphasis added)

While Lyell’s views replicate rather than elucidate any departure from norms
in the discussion of slavery, what is important to note is how his
argumentation draws on a linear notion of time (see Wright 2015, 37) that is
embedded in a biopolitical tale of applying stratigraphic thinking to ideas of
cultural and biological progression. This notion of progression is used
inversely to excuse and diminish the effect of the forced migration and
enslavements of Africans to the Americas. Lyell makes explicit in his
discussion on slavery and the interspersion of these discussions through his
notes on rocks and mineral resources how geology functions as the racial
supplement to the progress narrative. This racial supplementarity of geology
is not just a material placement in the order of things, but it does psychic
work in assuring white anxiety so that recognition of being fully human is
forestalled (and thus remains fully exploitable). Lyell’s anxiety read in
reverse shows that what allows white self-actualization (or comfort) is
slavery.
Spillers (2003, xiii) writes that “material values engender symbolic and
discursive ones (vice-versa) in perfect synecdochic harmony.” This
emplacement of the slave within geologic orders demonstrates the racial
encoding of political life (bios) in slavery through the categories of matter
and its properties before it becomes ideologically sedimented in a discourse
of racialized biology. Yet, there is a biopolitical disjuncture between the
description of geology and its corporeal affects that produces a monstrous
impolitic materiality. Rather, geologic time provides the context for the
formation of the privileged biocentric subject. The organization and
categorization of materiality enact a praxis of colonialism or a taxonomy of
race that is productive of racial logics that extend through and beyond
mineralogy and its extractions. The ancestry of human beings is not to be
always and entirely conflated with work on the development of species but
origins of human–animal filiation are part of the story that frames the
development of both the geologic and biological sciences. The context of
slavery and the practices of geology as an extractive science provide a co-
constituting fabric to colonial enterprise and the projects of description of
both the earth and the “place” of different humans within it. That is,
perceptions of social formations and geologic organizations are linked
through both practices and sets of ideas/ideals. In the context of the
propulsion of species narrative as the survival of all in the Anthropocene, this
cozy, “innocent” universal of geologic realism reinforces the idea of matter as
independent of its languages of description rather than as a structuring device
of property and properties. Thus it replicates the political and racial divisions
of matter even as it obscures them. Geology as colonial mode of
classification underwrites the Anthropocene regardless of which settler origin
story of the Anthropocene is taken as the moment of origination. If we see the
Anthropocene turn to the species thinking as a way to try to save it—in a
recuperative mode—this literally requires a writing of the rock (i.e., via a
geologically established mode of subjectivity) to achieve the overhaul of
human to species via geological epoch. To achieve this ideal of the Anthropos
as universal subject, the human needs to become both abstracted (from its
previous forms of exclusionary humanism) and already populated in the form
of the White Western master-subject whom Sylvia Wynter calls “Over
Represented Man.”
Geology is a mechanism of power and statecraft that has a lower resolution
or a more subterranean subjective operation than more performative
biopolitics, but it nonetheless continues to be repressive in its extraction
qualities and sediments the settler-colonial state. This extractive praxis sets
up an instrumental relation to land, ecology, and people. If the geosocial
relations of Old and New Worlds are put in conversation with their racial
formations, the racial nomos of white settler colonialism can be seen to be
established through the infrapolitics of geologic relations. Race and its
marking through the geologic term of the inhuman upsets the supposed
“natural” boundaries of matter in the classification of human/inhuman,
estranging both these terms. Whereas we recognize geologic material
practices (oil and mineral extraction) as explicitly tied up in the realm of the
political, the declared innocence of acts of description and their historical
inscriptions on bodies and geographies are left unexamined. Blackness opens
up this “scene of subjection” (Hartman 1997) to its historical fault lines, but it
also bears on those geoforces in the present, on the “now” of Blackness, and
how Blackness is cast in the storms of environmental change. Corporeality is
always established in the zone of territoriality as a form of territoriality over
and through black subjects, from chattel slavery through ongoing
environmental racism, wherein Blackness becomes what could be termed an
ontology without territory.
The purchase and extension of the territorial impulse (to conquer lands for
resource extraction and to organize labor forms to mobilize that extraction,
while simultaneously severing the bonds of attachment and territory of
enslaved peoples) to subjects organize the dual excess of colonialism.
Corporeality for black subjects was not established in the zone of ontology
but foreshadowed in the zone of territory and its grammars of extraction.
Intervening at the level of narrative is not just a redirection of sense and
politics—political aesthetics—but a recognition of how those narrative forces
shape the possibilities for praxis in contemporary extraction. It is a tactic to
secure a territory in the present against the redress of this historic possession
and the ways in which properties are cast and traded as fungible in processes
of valuation that make them exchangeable. Therefore any attempt at an
Anthropocenic universality is not a question of reorganization at the level of
ontology, or what could be called the desire for ontodeliverance, that is, the
idea that a new ontological formation that includes differently situated
subjects will change the terms of engagement. The very “matter” of territorial
impulse that materially comprised the Anthropocene is anti-Blackness; it is
racialized matter that delivers the Anthropocene as a geologic event into the
world, through mining, plantations, railroads, labor, and energy. While
Blackness is the energy and flesh of the Anthropocene, it is excluded from
the wealth of its accumulation. Rather, Blackness must absorb the excess of
that surplus as toxicity, pollution, and intensification of storms. Again, and
again.
The Division of Matter and Geologic Life
Crisscrossing this caesura between the inhuman and inhuman(e) is a way to
talk about the historical forms and contexts of the racialization of matter. The
organization and categorization of matter enact racialization. This enactment
is productive of racial logics that extend through and beyond mineralogy and
the deterritorialization that accompanies extraction. Geology provides the
logics to elide those attachments to geography through its classification
system of value and resource. While the search for geologic resources
instigated the imperative to enslave, geology quickly established itself as an
imperial science that both organized the extraction of the Americas and, in
the continued context of Victorian colonialism, became a structuring priority
in the colonial complex, especially in India, Canada, and Australia. These
territories became organized as material resources and markets for Empire,
and the geologic practices established in these colonies continued to
underwrite current neocolonial extraction processes by Canada and Australia
throughout the world (Canada, for example, is the largest national global
mining corporation). The ownership of strata and the surface–subsurface
bifurcation in Australia and Canada by the Crown continue to unsettle native
title and reservation lands. Thus the classificatory logics of geology have
implications for ongoing colonialism.
Geologic classification enabled the transformation of territory into a
readable map of resources and organized the apprehension of extraction and
the designation of extractable territories. Geology was the science of material
dispossession but also a social technology of naturalization. The motivation
of colonialism was as an extraction project. The consequence of this
formation of inhuman materialism was the organization of racializing logics
that maps onto and locks into the formation of extractable territories and
subjects. While the critiqued notion of environmental determinism of the
continents provided the basis for accounts of the classification of the races
and sedimented race into climatology, the rocks escaped being understood as
part of the determination of races. There was a material division made
between climate and earth through a property relation. The ideological notion
of environmental determinism is historically concurrent with the
classification of rocks, but rather than cement the relation between nature and
race, geology is used to separate one race (Blackness) from the mineralogical
ground while enriching another (Whiteness) through the description and
division of matter into a sign and system of containment. Bodies become
gold, emptied of the sign of the human, reinvested with the signification of
units of energy and properties of extraction. Black is made as will-less matter,
a commodity object of labor. This is what Hartman calls the “double bind of
agency,” where acceptance into the genre of the human is only offered as a
further inscription in the terms of labor and its modes of subjectivity.
Geology then becomes a spacing in the imagination that is used to separate
forms of the human into permissible modes of exchange and circulation. This
is the geotrauma of a billion Black Anthropocenes. If geologic relations are to
be examined, a radical interrogation must remain as traumatic as its passage.
This chapter has paid attention to the transactions between geology and
slavery as a traffic in modes of production and subjection, organized around
the grammar of the inhuman. Rather than turning away from this geologic
code, Black Poethics (to use Silva’s term) has intensified this bond as a
release from its bondage to redefine both black subjectivity and “inert”
materiality. In her poem Coal, Audre Lorde (1996, 6) revisits the
essentializing biology of matter in the context of language as a structuring
matter-economy, engaging the blackness of coal and its idealized form
(diamonds) as an oppositional transmutation (see also Dhairyam 2017;
Gumbs 2017):

I
Is the total black, being spoken
From the earth’s inside.
There are many kinds of open.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame
How a sound comes into a word, coloured
By who pays what for speaking.

Turning away from the privileged white subject of biopolitical life, the “I”
that Lorde throws her intimacy in with is allied to the inhuman earth. “I/Is the
total black” resists the autonomous and individualized subjectification of
Whiteness and refuses the inhuman codified as property to embrace the
collective subject of Blackness that has been gathered into categories of earth.
As Glissant (1997, 9) confirms, “we know ourselves as part and as crowd, in
an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are
open, and we sail them for everyone.” Shifting the terms of participation in
humanist models that were born in a scene of anti-Blackness, Lorde offers
another “open” that makes a commonality of the filiation of Blackness with
the earth. Repowering this inhuman designation through the rocks, spoken
from the earth’s insides, in the context of their extraction, she asks the crucial
question in the generation of value from black bodies and black rocks: who
pays what for the speaking? In the bold resistance of a given inhuman life,
poetry and spatial practices “replant” (in Wynter’s words) place, mark
another possible inhuman relation that does not replicate the confinements of
colonial grammar. Transmutation, metamorphoses, and ideals haunt the
graphia and geologies of the black radical tradition. In the next chapter, I turn
to this intimacy with the inhuman as an alliance with freedom in the matter
and maroonage of imposed lands, to think freedom in the earth, outside and
against the world of the “given” humanist subject (and their space-time).
 Insurgent Geology: A Billion Black
Anthropocenes Now
If, thus, we allow that an aesthetics is an art of conceiving,
imagining, acting, the other of thought is the aesthetics
implemented by me and by you to join the dynamics to which we
are to contribute. This is the part fallen to me in an aesthetics of
chaos.
—ÉDOUARD GLISSANT, Poetics of Relation

Counting her own theory, the theory of nothing, she had opened up
the world. In every city in the Old World are Marie Ursule’s New
World wanderers real and chimeric. . . . They wander as if they
have no century, as if they can bound time . . . compasses whose
directions tilt, skid off known maps. . . . They are bony with hope,
muscular with grief possession.
—DIONNE BRAND, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging
Black Geophysics and the “Unthought”
Geoaesthetics of the Earth
Inspired by the work of black feminist scholars—Dionne Brand’s poetry
about “coming out a woman crushing stones,” Sylvia Wynter’s ideas from
“Black Metamorphosis” on the “senses as theoreticians,” and Tina Campt’s
“quiet aesthetics”—this chapter plots the course of a black geophysics crafted
in the indices of fungibility and fugitivity, an aesthetics made in the
provisional ground of slavery and its continuing afterlives (Hartman 1997).
Focusing on three fugitive scenes—Steve McQueen’s paired films Carib’s
Leap/Western Deep (2002), a print of a slave woman jumping from a window
but suspended in a different gravitational field on display at the NMAAHC,
and Brand’s character Marie Ursule in At the Full and Change of the Moon
(1999)—I speak to the traffic between the categories of the inhuman in the
White Geology of transatlantic slavery and in its Anthropocenic present.
These images and Brand’s poetry of rocks insist upon what Campt calls
futurity through the notion of “tense,” to offer an anterior possibility that cuts
through coloniality as a counteraesthetic that refuses the inhuman in its
codified state as property. Rather, the intimacies with the inhuman forged
through “an aesthetics of chaos” are reworked in new poetic grammars to
create an insurgent geology of belonging, one that refuses capture by
geologic forces and redirects their nonstratified forces as a sense of
possibility. These, what Campt calls “quiet acts,” might be thought as an
“unthought” geophysics of White Geology, which gives another tense to the
property and properties relation that emerged through the black hole of
slavery, what might be called the black geophysics of “transplantation”
(Wynter, n.d.) to a New World.
Wynter uses the term transplantation to reconceptualize how black bodies
reclaimed a right to geography within the carceral confines of the plantation
and their relocation across the Atlantic. She argues that black culture
represented “an alternate way of thought, one in which the mind and the
senses coexist, where the mind ‘feels’ and the senses become theoreticians.
And black culture then and now remains the neo-popular, neo-native culture
of the disrupted. It coexisted, and coexists, with the ‘rational’ plantation
system, is in constant danger of destruction” (Wynter, n.d., 109). The idea of
“senses as theoreticians” establishes how modes of experience are established
in sense as a theoretical formulation of subjectivity made in the context of the
denial of that subjectivity. This aesthetics or (political affect) is deeply
political precisely because it relates to the possibility of life and its survival
under conditions of violence. Citing how blues, and its unending part,
without climax or end, established time outside of European sense of time
and factory time, blues time is taken as space and a subversive territory of
place; making of time into space creates territory free from enslaved labor, a
counterpoetics, “subterraneanly subversive of its surface reality” (Wynter,
n.d., 218). That is, “black oral culture of the New World constituted a
counter-aesthetic which was at the same time a counter-ethic” (Wynter, n.d.,
141). This thinking through sense achieved “the most difficult of all
revolutions—the transformation of psychic state of feeling” (Wynter, n.d.,
245, emphasis original).
Black Aesthetics at the End of the World
In Steve McQueen’s film Caribs’ Leap/Western Deep (2002),[1] two films
are paired that tell the story of an act of suicidal escape and collective
resistance in Grenada and contemporary gold mining in South Africa. It is a
twined story of fugitivity and fungibility, of indigenous genocide and black
bodies defined through the property of labor. Caribs’ Leap’s scene is 1651
Grenada, where the last Indian Caribs chose to jump to their deaths rather
than submit to the invading French. It is an event that is said to have occurred
at a cliff in the town of Sauteurs, now known as Caribs’ Leap. We see the
figures always in mid-flight, never jumping or landing but suspended in an
endless, ever falling body, gently held by the atmosphere. These figures defy
gravity, seemingly floating indefinitely in the sky, never surrendered to the
ground, cut alongside an image of a bobbing boat called Caliban and the
shifting sands on a beach. Western Deep was filmed in the TauTona Mine (or
Western Deep No. 3 Shaft) in the gold fields of the Witwatersrand Basin near
Johannesburg in South Africa. The Western Deep mines are owned by
AngloGold Ashanti, part of the international mining conglomerate Anglo
American, and the basin held about 50 percent of all the gold ever mined on
earth. The mines in the Witwatersrand Basin are the deepest mines in the
world at nearly 3.9 kilometers underground and represent the furthest human
bodies go into the earth’s depths. The mine employs nearly fifty-six hundred
miners, who travel for an hour down the shaft to the rock face, where
temperatures can reach up to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. In the deepest parts of
the mines, the pressure above the miners is ninety-five hundred tons per
meter squared, or approximately 920 times normal atmospheric pressure. The
conditions can have serious, life-threatening consequences for the miners.
McQueen’s camera follows the shaft down, down into the earth, through
dust, in the confined space of the cage, in the sheer near-darkness with a
sound that reverberates in the concrete shell of the empty cinema through the
tissue to bone. It is the black void of dark out of which nothing seems to
emerge; then there is punctuation by an intermittent flicking light that allows
a momentary sighting on location in the abyss, only to take us back down into
it again. A terrible incessant industrial noise wails, visceral to nerve of teeth,
exacting its excruciating assault on the body. After the shaft comes to the
surface, the miners, dressed in their blue shorts, perform exercises,
exhaustedly stepping up and down on a bench as red buzzers blare above
their heads. The heaviness of their bodies on the edge of collapse, unfocused
eyes from the dark void, all communicate the living death of their labor and
the gravity of two miles of rock on flesh. Structured around the themes of
descent, over- and underground, the films speak to a geophysics of anti-
Blackness: self-destruction as quotidian subjection and fugitive collective
escape. Cutting together gold and Blackness, past and future, McQueen
tethers the dual corporeal effects of geology as territorial and psychic
dispossession, a process of anti-Blackness that spans the two historical
moments from 1651 to 2002. McQueen’s figures of ascent and descent draw
on his own bibliographical connections to the island and the flying African
folklore that drew figures escaping the terror of slavery through a shift of
geophysics. Steve McQueen’s films together give us the surrogates of
geology; slavery exposes the subterranean space-time of geology as a psychic
and physical space. Sensibility here is not just thinking about exemplars of
freedom and slavery but a practice of theorizing of how certain conditions
pull and ground subjective possibilities within those twin natalities,
possibilities that are infused with the individuation of liberal subjectivity and
the collective refusal of that offering in what Glissant calls the “consent not
to be a single being.”
Refusing the path of self-destruction, either through persistence in the
violent property relation or through suicide, “flying Africans” (Synder 2015)
was a genre that presented a possibility of “Making a Way Out of No Way”
(NMAAHC), an alternative fungibility to the absolute fungibility of black
bodies as extraction frontier. This “other gravity” might be thought in Tiffany
King’s (2016, 1023) analysis of black fungibility as a spatial analytic, where
“Black fungibility also functions as a mode of critique and an alternative
reading practice that reroutes lines of inquiry around humanist assumptions
and aspirations that pull critique toward incorporation into categories like
labor(er).” King counters the absolute claim of fungiblity on the black body
and its properties, tilting the axis of engagement. She argues that by
“theorizing Black bodies as forms of flux or space in process rather than as
human producers, stewards and occupiers of space enables at least a
momentary reflection upon other kinds of (often forgotten) relationships that
Black bodies have to plants, objects, and non-human life forms” (1023).
Opening the state of possibility to the transformative intrarelations with other
forms of life and nonlife unsettles and redirects the confinements of humanist
prescriptions of what and how life is constituted. As King suggests, “black
fungibility can also operate as a site of deferral or escape from the current
entrapments of the human” (1024). Reclaiming fungibility from the bounded
inscriptions of black social death opens and realigns the property–properties
relation to speak to time-space coordinates that are not already occupied by
the authorizing center, Colonial Man.
In another scene of refusal, Brand’s character Marie Ursule, a slave on the
island of Trinidad in 1824 in At the Full and Change of the Moon (1999),
plots a mass suicide as a quiet and defiant act of revolt (based on an actual
mass slave suicide in 1802). Marie Ursule gathers the poisons, the potent
vines, learned from forging connections to this new earth and its ecologies,
from listening to the few Caribs “left alive on the island after their own great
and long devastation by the Europeans” (Brand 1999, 2). Faithful to its
plants, “she ground the roots to their arresting sweetness, scraped the bark for
its abrupt knowledge” (Brand 1999, 2). Marie Ursule alone remains after the
mass suicide, awaiting her death by the master, in order to witness his
witnessing of this brazen act of wreckage on the plantation economy. Not
taking the poison she has prepared, so that she can show them how she had
devastated them, she says to the planters, “This is but a drink of water to what
I have already suffered” (Brand 1999, 24) as she is beaten, broken, hanged,
and burned. After two years with her one foot ringed with ten pounds of iron
and the loss of an ear for an earlier attempt at escape, the queen of rebels
turns her terror back to its point of origination: the master. After the mass
poisoning of the Regiment of San Peur (without fear) society, the end of one
world begets another: that of the descendants of Marie Ursule, queen of the
San Peur. The morning of the suicide, Marie Ursule sends away her child
Bola, and the novel follows her Caribbean diaspora across the geographies of
the diaspora itself, from plantation to maroonage, through the centuries to the
streets of Toronto and Amsterdam. When the proclamation comes by Sir
George Fitzgerald Hill, lieutenant-governor in 1833, to end slavery, Brand
displaces this “grudgeful news” that has come too late and admits too much,
suggesting that “its authority is surpassed by the authority of Marie Ursule’s
act ten years ago when she woke up to the end of the world” (51).
Marie Ursule’s New World and its genealogy of fragmentation, its
wandering and desire, are told through the children of Bola, whose lives in
the great fluidity of diaspora parallel the fluidity of the air and matter and
rocks. Marie Ursule is remembered in the gathered impulses left in bones, in
lives that spill over in the new world coming, “gestures muscular with
dispossession” (Brand 1999, 20). Whereas slavery enacted terror, in
Hartman’s (2007, 40) terms, “terror was ‘captivity without the possibility of
flight,’ inescapable violence, precarious life. There was no going back to a
time or place before slavery, and going beyond it no doubt would entail
nothing less momentous that yet another revolution.” Such a revolution is
exacted in the refusal of Marie Ursule through her quotidian relations with
plant and geologic life that form an otherwise, which refutes the inhuman
constitution of the fungible relation through the fugitivity of dispossession.
The impossible becomes possible through a shift in the exchanges of
inhuman fungibility. Overwriting the capacity for nonbeing in the diaspora,
Brand’s materiality of language establishes the presentness of Blackness and
makes that presentness an obligation with which to counter its erasure. Her
poetry speaks the fungibility of the black body as flooded with the world. The
earth, the weather, the ocean, and the tides and its materiality have a life in
the work and world. It is a materiality that cuts through coloniality as a
counteraesthetic, a poetry of rocks that tells a different story of rocks.
 Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Brand’s writing finds, haunts, and nudges against another image of a

woman leaping, sleep walking, escaping, held in the suspension between
fungibility and fugitivity. A woman is suspended out the window in an 1817
print at the NMAAHC. The text reads that she jumped out of the window
after the sale of her husband and that she survived the fall. The wind catches
and balloons her dress, but she is not falling. She has a different field of
gravity that is held by a barely perceptible planetary shift in the allegiances of
matter: “The problem was gravity and the answer was gravity” (Brand 2014,
157). She both escaped out the window and is not yet returned to the
exposure of her captivity through the forces that would return her to the earth.
The image possesses something of what Campt (2017, 5) calls the quiet
amplification of “rupture and refusal.” In the geophysics of this image of the
suspended woman, gravity is both the problem and the solution, rendering her
invulnerable, held in the possible, awaiting a different tense of being. A
different future. In another era, in the 1983 American invasion of Grenada,
another woman is forced into conflict with the weight of this historical
gravity of colonialism:

She jump. Leap from me. Then I decide to count the endless
names of stones. Rock leap, wall heart, rip eye, cease breadth,
marl cut, blood leap, clay deep, coal dead, coal deep, never
rot, never cease, sand high, bone dirt, dust hard, mud bird,
mud fish, mud word, rock flower, coral water, coral heart,
coral breath. . . .
She’s flying out to sea and in the emerald she sees the sea, its
eyes translucent, its back solid going to some place so old
there’s no memory of it. She’s leaping. She’s tasting her own
tears and she is weightless and deadly. She feels nothing
except the bubble of a laugh each time she breathes. Her body
is cool, cool in the air. Her body has fallen away, it just a line,
an electric current, the sign of lightning left after lightening, a
faultless arc to the deep turquoise deep. She doesn’t need air.
She’s in some other place already, less tortuous, less fleshy.
(Brand 1996, 241–42, 246–47)

In these images of another gravity, the printmaker and poet have, in Campt’s
(2017, 17) words, strived “for the tense of possibility that grammarians refer
to as the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen.” A
woman is waiting, suspended above the earth in a different gravity. In the
grammar of black feminist futurity, it is

a performance of a future that hasn’t yet happened but must. It

is an attachment to a belief in what should be true, which
impels us to realize that aspiration. It is power to imagine
beyond current fact and to envision that which is not, but must
be. It’s a politics of prefiguration that involves living the
 future now—as imperative rather than subjunctive—as a
striving for the future you want to see, right now, in the
present. (Campt 2017, 17)

If the woman who is fleeing out of the window is given an escape route that
matches her own claim to possession of her body by the printmaker, her
survival is doubly given in a disruptive grammar of geology; she has
unbound herself in the very same language of matter that would make a
person into a thing, defying the weight of her flesh arranged in the matter of
anti-Blackness.
Hartman urges an attentiveness to how Blackness is made captive. Any
recourse to the release of that captivity in descriptive moments of
transgression that are held up as agency should be treated with caution in the
“tragic continuities between slavery and freedom.” Imagining and
representing scenes of “freedom” within slavery, a kind of hopeful
overcoming, negates the way in which freedom and its conceptual apparatus
were built on that subjection, with slavery very much in mind. That is,
humanity was never for the whole of humanity, and freedom was only for
some and a systemic regulation (and literal reproduction) of slavery for
others. There is no recuperation of the captive or the captured in terms of
agency within these positions and their legacy in the afterlife of slavery,
because there is never the possibility of consent Hartman argues. The Black
Anthropocenes or None is thus already a priori null and void. Drawing
attention to a billion Black Anthropocenes is not a vehicle of visibility to see
the dark underbelly of modernity with greater clarity, because it is already
erased and caught in the process of erasure. So “Blackness” and “Slave”
could be added to the ledger of Lewis and Maslin’s diagram of New World
exchange as the sub- or surtext of racial difference and extraction, but that
would do nothing to ameliorate that this was not an exchange by any
conception of the imagination, only an “X” that marks the absence of that
possibility. Slavery and genocide are the urtext to discussions of species and
geology, their empirical bedrock and epistemic anchor. Another way to say
this is that escape from captivity is only possible within the indices of that
grammar of captivity and its interstitial moments, never as idealized outside
of it. The deformation of inhuman subjectivity is made from within that
matter, and so is its refusal and aesthetics of resistance. That is, to paraphrase
Campt (2017, 59), to reread refusal not necessarily as “an inextricable
expression of agential intention” but as a muscular refashioning, “bony with
hope.” The destabilization of the inhuman as a category of chattel into an
atmospheric, environmental sense and geophysical “tense” (Campt 2017)
repositions the “event” in a different idea of time, space, and matter, an
affective environment made through altered categories of description or
aesthetics of the inhuman.
The colonial inscription that overwrites the inhuman as property and
properties and its parallel geologies of displacement are aptly articulated by
Brand (1997) in Land, written in the rifts of this geologic reason. She says,
“Written as wilderness, wood, nickel, water, coal, rock, prairie, erased as
Athabasca, Algonquin, Salish, Inuit . . . hooded in Buxton fugitive, Preston
Black Loyalist, railroaded to gold mountain, swimming to Komagata
Maru. . . . Are we still moving? Each body submerged in its awful history.
When will we arrive?” (77). The places of Athabasca, Algonquin, Salish,
Inuit, become “wilderness,” nickel, coal, prairie, commodities to be extracted.
The Buxton community of black Canadians in Ontario, descendants of freed
and fugitive slaves who escaped via the Underground Railroad; the “gold
mountain” on the continental divide of British Columbia and Alberta, where
Chinese migrants mined for gold; the black Loyalists in Preston and their
waves of relocation by the British; maroons from Jamaica deported to Nova
Scotia, granted less land in surveys for sharecropping than whites; the
Komagata Maru, which brought British subjects from Punjab, British India,
to Canada, and who were refused entry by the racist Canadian exclusion
laws; the waves and waves of nonarrival and the uncertainty that can never
reassuringly assert “you are Here” to confirm your place in the universe: this
“unbearable archaeology” (Brand 1997, 73) of the geologic codes of
dispossession time-travel to arrive in the racist impulse of the white cop who
stops three friends in a snowstorm on the way to Buxton. These material
histories sediment and arrive in the now as a continued challenge to presence
in the context of erasure. They arrive as a geophysics of sense.
In Listening to Images, Campt develops an idea of “tense” as an affectual
force of politics, enacting a movement toward a different theoretical
possibility through the destabilization of the mode of encounter, listening
rather than seeing the quiet soundings, blurring the authority of the visual
code. She reorganizes the aesthetic sense of engagement away from the
dominant reading of images as visual to attenuate both attention and a mode
of reading resistance through tense (of the poise and noise of black bodies).
Campt’s (2017, 16) work on photography’s quiet registers of meaning
identifies an undercurrent in which we might read “possibilities obliquely . . .
the tiny, often miniscule chinks and crevices of what appears to be the
inescapable web of capture” in the “terms and tenses of grammar,”
undercurrents that travel through more surface-led summations. She argues
that the future can be conceived in terms of acts and political movements, but
“I believe we must not only look but also listen for it in other, less likely
places . . . in some of the least celebrated, often most disposable archives”
(16). That is, decentering Eurocentric logics is not just a theoretical exercise
of decolonization but a realignment of sense through affective infrastructures,
an affective mattering in the discourse of materiality and its worlds. Campt
says,

Futurity is, for me, not a question of “hope”—though it is

certainly inescapably intertwines with the idea of aspiration.
To me it is crucial to think about futurity through a notion of
“tense.” What is the “tense” of a black feminist future? It is a
tense of anteriority, a tense relationship to an idea of
possibility that is neither innocent nor naïve. Nor is it
necessarily heroic or intentional. It is often humble and
strategic, subtle and discriminating. It is devious and exacting.
It’s not always loud and demanding. It is frequently quiet and
opportunistic, dogged and disruptive. (17)

Campt’s understanding of new arrangements of sense that are

counterintuitive to the directional flow of readings that take place within the
intellectual framework of Western liberalism enacts an axiological redirection
of sense into new theoretical possibilities (affectual possibilities within the
tight spaces of the quotidian rather than on their outsides). Reiterating
Wynter’s call to take the senses as theoreticians, this unsettles sense and
settles it into new formations that have a political charge precisely because
they have a subterranean force that travels underneath and through colonial
technologies of space and time. The printmaker’s gentle craft is to not subject
the woman out the women to the gravitational field, to give her, or rather let
her claim, another geophysics of being that does not subject her to an
“inevitable” geo-logics of her designated material and symbolic position (a
position that she has already claimed for herself in her leap). White Geology
offers a geophysics of anti-Blackness, but the black woman held in
countergravity expands the dimensions of geologic force through a different
tense of possibility and relation to the earth. Rather than being framed in the
“vexed genealogy of freedom” that forged the liberal imagination through
“entanglements of bondage and liberty” (Hartman 1997, 115), she is
partaking of a different gravitational opening, in Césaire’s ([1972] 2000, 42)
words, “made to the measure of the world.”
In the lexicon of geology that takes possession of people and places,
delimiting the organization of existence, the refusal of such captivity makes a
commons in the measure and pitch of the world, not the exclusive
universality of the humanist subject. I think of all the forced stoniness[2] that
I have read in this past year through the literatures of slavery and its
afterlives, the brittle broken rocks and bones forced together in mines, in the
cut of cane on the plantation, the stoniness of bodies held against the
imagination of a black life as an empty sign of property that positioned them
as a receptacle for white desire and violence (per Hartman), the endurance of
a stony patience that doesn’t forget love. Rather, this rock poetry finds that
love is in the oceanic of the earth. As Brand (1997, 46) imagines slaves on
factory ships, whose crank of the neck and tip of the boat reveal for a
moment the horizon, “they moving toward their own bone . . . ‘so thank god
for the ocean and the sky all implicated, all unconcerned,’ they must have
said, ‘or there’d be nothing to love.’” Lilting, in the shit of the hold and the
tip of the waves, “stripped in their life, naked as seaweed, they would have
sat and sunk but no, the sky was a doorway, a famine and a jacket.” A refusal
to be delimited is found in the matter of the world and a home in its
maroonage; “they wander as if they have no century, as if they can bound
time . . . compasses whose directions tilt, skid off known maps” (46).
Refusal might be understood in terms of the friendship of the “No” that
Maurice Blanchot ([1971] 1997, 111–12) locates in the resistance to torture
or oppression (perhaps influenced by his own experience in front of a firing
squad)—a refusal that affirms the break or the rupture from an unacceptable
logic and reason:

What we refuse is not without value or importance. This is

precisely why refusal is necessary. There is a kind of reason
that we will no longer accept, there is an appearance of
wisdom that horrifies us, there is an offer of agreement and
 compromise that we will not hear. A rupture has occurred. We
have been to this frankness that does not tolerate complicity
any longer. When we refuse, we refuse with a movement free
from contempt and exaltation, one that is as far as possible
anonymous, for the power of refusal is accomplished neither
by us nor in our name, but from a very poor beginning that
belongs first of all to those who cannot speak . . . refusal is
never easy, that we must learn how to refuse and to maintain
intact this power of refusal, by the rigor of thinking and
modesty of expression that each one of our affirmations must
evidence from now on.

Tilting the axis of engagement within a geological optic and intimacy, the
inhuman can be claimed as a different kind of resource than in its propertied
colonial form—a gravitational force so extravagant, it defies gravity.
Forging a new language of geology must provide a lexicon with which to
take apart the Anthropocene, a poetry to refashion a new epoch, a new
geology that attends to the racialization of matter (see Silva 2017). Turning to
critical black aesthetics is not an attempt to reformulate the Anthropocene
into a different scene through black ontologies, ontologies without territories,
but to locate more precisely how the praxis of that aesthetic, forged as it was
within the context of inhuman intimacies that are inherently antiblack
(constituted by the material geographies of colonialism, slavery, and
diaspora), locates an insurgent geology. The origins of the Anthropocene
continue to erasure and dissimulate violent histories of encounter,
dispossession, and death in the geographical imagination. This geologic
prehistory has everything to do with the Anthropocene as a condition of the
present; it is the material history that constitutes the present in all its
geotraumas and thus should be embraced, reworked, and reconstituted in
terms of agency for the present, for the end of this world and the possibility
of others, because the world is already turning to face the storm, writing its
weather for the geology next time. We are all, after all, involved in geology,
from the cosmic mineralogical constitution of our bodies to the practices and
aesthetics that fuel our consumption and ongoing extraction. Our desire is
constituted in the underground, shaped in the mine and the dark seams of
forgotten formations that one day we will become, that we are already
becoming. But our relation to the underground is different.
 Inside the language of inhuman proximities, the ghosts of geology rise,
naming storms, tornados, leaves, and rivers as experience. Césaire (quoted in
Brand 2001, 58) writes,

I should discover once again the secret of great

Communication and great combustions . . .

I have words vast enough to

contain you and you, earth, tense drunken earth . . .
 Writing a Geology for the Storm
Next Time
My own effort is to try to bear witness to something that will have
to be there when the storm is over, to help us get through the next
storm. Storms are always coming.
—JAMES BALDWIN, quoted in Ed Pavlic, “Who Can Afford to
Improvise?”: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the
Listeners

To travel without a map, to travel without a way. They did, long

ago. That misdirection became the way. After the Door of No
Return, a map was only a set of impossibilities, a set of changing
locations.
—DIONNE BRAND, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging

A Billion Black Anthropocenes is a mediation on the politics and poetics of

abjection that underpin the becoming of the Anthropocene as a material and
durational fact in bodies and environments: a subtended geology that
differentiates and is differentiating in relations of power. Geologists may say,
what has this got to do with geology, to which may be replied, everything!
The Anthropocene was conceived as a political geology, and that is its
practice, and besides, historically, when was geology anything but political in
its narratives about the world, origins, and the weaponization of extraction as
a motivation and mode of dispossession? Deep-time and near-time geologic
questions are entangled with hard political questions about decolonizing and
the possibility of futures. Noticing the meshwork of anti-Blackness and
colonial structures of the Anthropocene, which constitute the distinct
underbelly to its origin stories, gives visibility to the material and bodily
work that coercively carries the Anthropocene into being and challenges the
narrative accounts of agency there within. That is, the survival of these
geologic surrogates disrupts, shows up, and contests the easy accounts of
colonial universalism and its reproduction of power geometries in geological
life. I want to alter how we think and imagine geological relations in
nonextractive modes, to think about encountering the coming storm in ways
that do not facilitate its permeant renewal. Regardless of the political weather
that conditions the terminology around environmental rupture, there is no
getting away from the radical presencing of geology in our lives, as energy,
sensibility, storm, rift, and a growing awareness of what that energy costs
across corporeal and planetary bodies (an awareness that has had its
“quieted” witnesses since 1492). When the storm is over, there will be
another. The storms are always coming, with faster and greater intensity.
From a very literal point of view, these storms might very well be the loudest
and most insistent political message and material instantiation of the
Anthropocene today. If today’s storm is a prelude to another, what, in
Baldwin’s words, would help us get through the storm next time?
A tentative movement toward the decolonialization of the Anthropocene
might be made through geo-Poethics. Geo-Poethics takes up Silva’s use of
the term Poethics to denote a black feminist praxis that might actively
announce a whole way of knowing, doing, existing, as an ethical mandate.
Silva (2014) says, “What is Black Poethic Intention? Is it an ethics, which
instead of the betterment of the World as we know it aims at its end?” Such
an Anthropocene geo-Poethics would turn against Man and the homogenizing
impulse of humanist tropes into and another world of matter that puts race as
central to the geosocial and geo-Poethical formations of the Anthropocene.
This geo-Poethical tension might propel us toward the idea of a billion Black
Anthropocenes as an unsettling in Anthropocenic thought. I have argued that
the Anthropocene exhibits a colonial geology, a geology in which spikes are
named and conceived, which in turn generates a specifically racialized
territorialization of the earth. In light of this colonialism and how geomorphic
moments are marked in the flesh of targeted communities, there is a need
both to rethink the empirics of this social geology—that is, to pay attention to
the material composition of these geologic moments—and epistemically not
to reproduce those arrangements of power in the telling. Currently we have a
White Anthropocene that transforms the epistemic traditions of the particular
into a general expression without “refashioning at a collective level” the
terms of humanity (Silva 2015, 99).
How is it possible to dislodge the language of geology so that such
dispossessing movements cannot be so easily made? This is a question of
redress that frames the Anthropocene in the alchemy of race and geology as a
calculus of extraction. If the Anthropocene prompts a recognition of the
change in quality of the subjective force of geology, it must do so at a
material level in the ways that geologic relations structure, sustain, condition,
and constrain agency. And it must do so at a symbolic level, to challenge the
ways in which geologic classification organizes psychic lives and modes of
nonbeing. That is to think about how “geopower” (Yusoff 2018) is a product
of subjugating relations as well as geopolitical consideration and
capitalization rather than to reinforce and reiterate the “naturalization” of
colonial dispossession of land and minerals. This historic analysis extends
concern for the contemporary subjects caught in dehumanizing geologic
relations that deform the earth in various ways (which is recognized in the
Anthropocene) and that deform subjects (which is not explicitly recognized).
Rarely are these twinned structural deformations thought together as an
epistemic praxis that finds its resolution in inhuman relation. Who is
protected by such a division in these inhuman structures? How does geologic
nomenclature space the distance between these two conjoined operations? If
the imagination of planetary peril coerces an ideal of “we,” it only does so
when the entrappings of late liberalism become threatened. This “we” negates
all responsibility for how the wealth of that geology was built off the
subtending strata of indigenous genocide and erasure, slavery and carceral
labor, and evades what that accumulation of wealth still makes possible in the
present—lest “we” forget that the economies of geology still largely regulate
geopolitics and modes of naturalizing, formalizing, and operationalizing
dispossession and ongoing settler colonialism.
What would a geology look like that refused its role as formulated by the
adage that Charles Lyell famously coined—“the key to the past lies in the
present”—and moved, instead, with the anticipatory geologic formations of
the Anthropocene, a formulation that explicitly recognizes that the key to the
future lies in the present and that the present is not just future oriented but
that the future is already inscripted in the present, already bounding with the
material recombinations of the bad material formulations of the past secreted
into future possibilities? Writing a geology for the storm next time would
move away from the immediate political gratification of naming a Golden
Spike or being author of a new origin story into the historical record of a
geology that is at once destabilizing of the historicity that it carries and
cognizant of the bloody catalog that it has marked. A set of questions
emerges from this derangement of geology:
 1. How does the formation of the Anthropocene as a political geology
reformulate and reimagine material relations that have hitherto been
organized by anti-Blackness?
2. What displacements of violence go into this maneuver to organize
around an “innocent” geologic subjectivity in the pursuit of a future
environmental citizenship? What strategies of individuation and
communing are involved in the geologizing of the social?
3. Who is vulnerable to injury by the idea of the Anthropocene,
epistemologically and materially, in the erasure of differentiated effects
and sharing of the surplus? In parallel, what becomes invulnerable to
scrutiny?
4. How do these propositions of geologic life in the Anthropocene organize
and manage a set of relations in a regulatory framing of propertied and
properties? What are the normative presuppositions of geology as a way
of operating and extending settler colonialism through the nomenclature
of materiality and the praxis of extractions?
5. Since geology is a hinge that joins indigenous genocide, slavery, and
settler colonialism through an indifferent structure of extraction,
indifferent to the specifies of people and places, how does the refusal of
responsibility in the mapping of pasts and futures of geology leave the
present unchecked?

A Billion Black Anthropocenes proposes a new graphia of geology that

unearths the racial secretions in its historic and future praxis. Rather than
seeing Blackness as biopolitical, we might also see it as a geopolitical act in
the division of flesh and earth though the grammar of the inhuman. What I
propose is that the Anthropocene produces a geophysics of anti-Blackness
enacted through sets of material and psychic relations in the designation of
property and properties. The championing of the collective in geology under
the guise of universality or humanity is actually a deformation of the
differentiation of subjective relations made in and through geology. This is
how the codification of geology (as land, mineral, metal, gold, commodity,
value, resource) becomes the historical basis of theft, actioning a field of
dispossession in which the language of containment is used to materially
organize extraction, where violence is covered in the guise of liberating
surplus wealth from people and the earth. A Billion Black Anthropocenes
goes in search of a grammar of geology for the storm next time. It proposes
that the event of geology become truly marked by the colonial marks that
have instigated its passage across the “measure of the world” (Césaire [1972]
2000, 73). It embraces its intimacies with the inhuman. It asserts an insurgent
geology for the end of the world, for the possibility of other worlds not
marked by anti-Blackness, where the inhuman is a relation, no longer an
appendage of fungibility. It is a refusal of the white overburden of geology
that has secreted its excess into every pore of the earth. No geology is neutral.

The problem was gravity and the answer was gravity. (Brand
2014, 157)
 Acknowledgments

This work started out as a response to a call from Angela Last, who organized
a workshop on “Decolonizing the Anthropocene” in 2015. The ideas and text
have metamorphosed many times since, in response to attendance at too
many Anthropocene events, where the absence of discussions of race allowed
the smooth flow of patriarchal reason to make its earth anew. The citation
practice I have followed reflects these absences. My aim in this book was to
open a space for these critical discussions about race and geology, because
women, especially women of color, if citation practices are to be believed, do
not write theories of the earth, and if the same citation practices are to be
adhered to, they don’t write much of anything, expect their own erasure!
Specifically, I am grateful for invitations from Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer
Mae Hamilton (Sydney University, “Hacking the Anthropocene: Feminist,
Queer and Anticolonial Propositions,” April 2016), Rory Rowan (University
of Zurich, “The Anthropocene between Earth and Social Sciences,”
November 2016), Jody Dean (Fisher Center for the Study of Women and
Men, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, “Gender, Climate, and the
Anthropocene,” February 2016), the New Materialism Conference (Paris
UNESCO, “Environmental Humanities and New Materialisms: The Ethics of
Decolonizing Nature and Culture,” June 2017), Andrew Baldwin (Durham
University, December 2017), and the London Group of Historical
Geographers (Institute for Historical Research, November 2017). I am
especially grateful for helpful comments on and critical responses to this
work as I learned my way through the literatures of black studies and
geology. A special shout-out to Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman
for the sprint to issue me with my “queer trails” badge in Paris. I am grateful
to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where I read Sylvia
Wynter’s extraordinary “Black Metamorphosis” and James Baldwin’s essays,
and to the archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
and the incredible National Museum of African American History and
Culture. The team at University of Minnesota Press have been enthusiastic
throughout this process, and especial thanks are due to Dani Kasprzak, Jason
Weidman, and Anne Carter. The text was finally written up during a
fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Durham University. Without
that concentrated time and the fine fellowship encountered there, this work
would never have been made into this (small) book. For friendship and food
during the storms, thanks are due to Lisa, Andrew, Lorcan and Torin,
Amanda and Pete, Robyn, and, in Durham, the “Fellows,” Divya Tolia-Kelly,
Siobhán McGrath, Elizabeth Johnson, and Andrew Baldwin. Thinking with
shapes where the writing ends up. For keeping the fires burning and the
humor sharp in the End of the World “comms,” I thank Jennifer Gabrys, Tim
Pearn, Myra Hird, Nigel Clark, Angela Last, and Stephanie Wakefield. In its
most joyous releases and subterranean modes, thought is a conversation made
on the shuttle back and forth. I have had the pleasure of having longtime
interlocutors about the inhuman in Nigel Clark and Myra Hird, and the deep-
time provocations of Mary Thomas have changed that thinking in all its
orientations.
 Notes

Preface
1. This work is forthcoming in the book Geologic Life.
Geology, Race, and Matter
1. When I use the term geologic life, I do so to signal the corporeality of geology as a
material embodiment and a systematic framing of materiality that has geopolitical and
biopolitical consequences for the possibilities of being and nonbeing (see Yusoff 2013,
2015, 2018).
2. It should be noted that the only reason we know anything about geology is because of
fossils uncovered through mining and the motivation for the development of geologic
knowledge in order to mobilize this extraction frame.
3. The fields of indigenous studies and black studies are complex in their differences and
their exactitude of cojoined but differently enacted historical experience, especially in
the context of natality and genealogies of land rights.
4. For example, while writing up this work on an Advanced Institute Fellowship at Durham
University, we had a tour of the Palace Green library, where substantial archives on the
British colony on Sudan are kept. In this colonial archive were maps of relations between
tribes and attempts to decipher their genealogy to establish a cartography of authority.
This was complemented by anthropology reports on tribal markings, earth eaters,
tattooing, female circumcision, and native surgery (Sudan 1908), in an attempt to
decipher markers of sexuality and rites and rituals that produced the native as other.
Golden Spikes and Dubious Origins
1. Thanks to Nigel Clark for this formation of thought.
2. http://www.nhm.ac.uk/nature-online/life/plants-fungi/seeds-oftrade/page.dsml?
section=crops&page=spread&ref=maize.
3. Wynter (2015, 23) reminds us that the “larger issue is, then, the incorporation of all
forms of human being into a single homogenized descriptive statement that is based on
the figure of the West’s liberal monohumanist Man. And this conception of being,
because ostensibly natural-scientific, is biocentric.” Thus this Man is restricted in its
biopolitical horizon to a liberal form of subjectivity that denies the ecologies and
geophysics of existence. Furthermore, as Katherine McKittrick argues, “the human is
tied to epistemological histories that presently value a genre of the human that reifies
Western bourgeois tenets; the human is therefore wrought with physiological and
narrative matters that systematically excise the world’s most marginalized” (quoted in
Wynter 2015, 9).
4. Wynter’s claim on indigenization and learning new forms of planting subjectivity in the
earth is a means to claim back a stolen subjective-geographic relation and should not be
confused with a claim of indigeneity. Within the context of settler colonialism,
indigeneity rightly makes specific material claims about sovereignty and territory that
are different from the claims that Wynter is making for black slaves. I believe Wynter is
arguing for us to notice the creation of new material grammar outside of plantation geo-
logics that humanize inhuman conditions through a relation to the earth that is planetary,
not territorial.
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLCF7vPanrY.
6. ‘Project 4.1 Biomedical Studies: Studies of Response of Human Beings Exposed to
Significant Beta and Gamma Radiation due to Fall-Out from High Yield Weapons”:
“The purposes of [Project 4.1] were to (1) evaluate the severity of radiation injury to the
human beings exposed, (2) provide for all necessary medical care, and (3) conduct a
scientific study of radiation injuries to human beings” (Martin and Rowland 1982, 186,
188).
7. The use and return of the suits indicate a certain performative quality in the U.S.
military’s subjection of the Marshallese citizens, not unlike the rented clothing that slave
dealers used on the slave blocks.
8. The subtests involving plutonium, uranium, and beryllium and were code-named
“Kittens,” “Rats,” and “Vixen,” which ironically are representative of the feral ecologies
that accompanied settlers and had such a devastating effect on the unique flora and fauna
of Australia.
9. https://africaisacountry.atavist.com/decolonizing-knowledge-and-the-question-of-the-
archive.
10. Terisa Tinei Siagatonu, “Layers,” http://themissingslate.com/2017/10/01/layers/.
11. And even Otherness positioned in the pursuit of freedom was itself “romancing the
shadow.” Morrison (1992, 37–38) suggests, “The slave population, it could be and was
assumed, offered itself up as surrogate selves for meditation on problems of human
freedom, its lure and its exclusiveness. . . . Nature without limits, natal loneness, internal
aggression . . . in other words, this slave population was understood to have offered itself
up for reflections on human freedom in terms other than the abstractions of human
potential and the rights of man.
The Inhumanities
1. The black feminist Audre Lorde (1984) challenges Baldwin’s attachment to the
American dream as a patriarchal instantiation: “Deep, deep, deep down I know that
dream was—never mine. . . . Nobody was studying me except as something to wipe
out. . . . Even worse than the nightmare is the Blank. And Black women are the
blank. . . . We have to admit and deal with difference. . . . If we can put people on the
moon and we can blow this whole planet up, if we can consider digging 18 inches of
radioactive dirt off the Bikini atolls and somehow finding something to do with it—if we
can do that, we as Black cultural workers can somehow begin to turn that stuff around.”
Insurgent Geology: A Billion Black
Anthropocenes Now
1. McQueen’s film was screened in the abandoned, subterranean Lumiere cinema in St.
Martin’s Lane, London, in November 2002.
2. Wynter (n.d., 128) describes how, in colonizers’ descriptions of slave crucifixion, slaves
appeared to them as little affected by their sadistic torture, “behaving all the time with a
degree of hardened insolence, and brutal insensibility,” suggesting an inability on the
colonizers’ part to perceive the sensibility of black pain or to understand the courage
marshaled against it.
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Kathryn Yusoff is professor of inhuman
geography at Queen Mary University of London.