Geologic life: inhuman intimacies and the geophysics of race
"Geologic Life provides a magisterial account of the specific processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Building on the core idea first explored in her breakout short book A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None--that race is as much a geological formation as a biological one--Kathryn Yusoff develops a spatial account of racialization based on rifts and plateaus, what she calls "the stratigraphic imagination"; that structured Enlightenment thought and its colonial conceptions of the world. The book provides a deep and detailed reconsideration of core figures (Louis Agassiz, James Hutton, Georges Cuvier, and others) from the emergence of Enlightenment and colonial sciences in the 17th-20th centuries to show how colonial geology (as the classification of the origins of earth and beings) organized, and continues to underpin, racialized accounts of space and time"--