Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race

by Kathryn Yusoff

In Geologic Life , Kathryn Yusoff theorizes the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Examining the history of geology as a discipline and ongoing mineral and resource extraction, Yusoff locates forms of imperial geology embedded in Western and Enlightenment thought and highlights how it creates anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Brown environmental and racial injustices. Throughout, she outlines how the disciplines of geology and geography and their conventions—surveying, identifying, classifying, valuing, and extracting—established and perpetuated colonial practices that ordered the world and people along a racial axis. Examining the conceptualization of the inhuman as political, geophysical, and paleontological, Yusoff unearths an apartheid of materiality as distinct geospatial forms. This colonial practice of geology organized and underpinned racialized accounts of space and time in ways that materially made Anthropocene Earth. At the same time, Yusoff turns to Caribbean, Indigenous, and Black thought to chart a parallel geologic epistemology of the ‘earth-bound’ that challenges what and who the humanities have chosen to overlook in its stories of the earth. By reconsidering the material epistemologies of the earth as an on-going geotrauma in colonial afterlives, Yusoff demonstrates that race is a geological formation as much as a biological one.

608 pages, Hardcover

Published May 10, 2024

About the author

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London.

Reviews

[endrju]

pp. 1-26 Okay, I see what you want to do
pp. 27-30 YASSS!
pp. 31-36 Ermmm...
pp. 39-118 What?
pp. 121-235 Okay, we're back on track... Sort of

But I'm going to stop here.

There's density and there's... this. If the author's not going to make even an ounce of effort to properly differentiate between the terms they are using (and no, the section "Geologic Life Lexicon" does not do that), then I'm not going to make an effort to understand. Which is too bad, because the book had a promising framework.

[Holden Bukowsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Geologic Life is a complex, challenging, and incredibly insightful read. Yusoff’s writing is dense, and often time required a couple of read throughs for the main argument of that section to come through. However, I think this is partly endemic to what Yusoff is attempting to do in this book: bring together a social critique that informs the readers of a new fundamental starting point for understanding structurally anti-black, anti-brown, and anti-Indigenous epistemology. Throughout the book, Yusoff’s utilization of a diverse set of case studies, historical anecdotes, and then theorizing all come together to create a unique and convincing argument about the importance of understanding racialized violence as an epistemic, material and geopolitical phenomena.

Part of the draw to this book is the number of scholars that Yusoff draws from. Readers with deep interest in critical scholarship from the 21st century will find this book to be representative of the creative and explanatory possibilities generated by authoring a multi-study project.

While Yusoff’s book contains relevant, revolutionary, and important lessons for approaching the study of racialized violence, the density of the book is something to note. For readers wanting an incredibly clear cut book wherein the author gets straight to the point, they might find this book challenging to get through as the work Yusoff is doing in Geologic Life often causes for the writing to get muddled in quite a few places. For me, there were times as I progressed through the book where I understood more of the larger argument, but had a simultaneous raise in the level of confusion I was experiencing from the read. This book can and will most likely take 3-4 read throughs for the reader to completely understand all aspects of the book.

However, despite the density, Yusoff’s work in Geologic Life is noteworthy for how transformative it is for understanding the historical expression of racialized violence. I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone that is willing to undertake the task to read it.

[Satpreet · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm surprised at the reviews. Yes, it's dense. It's an academic theoretical text. But I found it to be really engrossing and easy to follow, given how these texts generally go.

Yes, writers should think about accessibility, but they should also consider honestly who their audience is, and as an academic and artist, I am grateful Yusoff considered someone like me when she did not overly simplify this work. I think there is a dangerous trend where we expect every text to be accessible to everyone, but that leads to a homogeneity of depth and expertise. Not everything has to be for everyone.

Anyone who is struggling with this text should try her much smaller book, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. It might be a good place to start. Or listen to a couple of her lectures - many of which are on youtube. But externalizing one's own inability to access this text as a failure of the author, rather than a mutual lack of compatibility, reflects so much about the state of learning today.

[Pirkka · Rating 1 out of 5]

I had to stop reading on page 50. The writing style is absolutely inaccessible. It's a pity because the theme and the approach of the author are interesting. It seems that the author has not considered readers at all.