Kathryn Yusoff

In Geologic Life, Kathryn Yusoff theorizes the processes by which race and racialization emerged geologically. Examining both 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 as much a geological formation as a biological one.

Moulded from clay, between 2021 and 2023, The subtle rules the dense is a series of ceramic chest plates, by the artist Phoebe Collings-James. Inspired by Makonde and Yoruba body masks and Roman muscle cuirasses, the sculptures explore the interplay between ritualistic objects’ violent histories and their contemporary presentation as fetishistic ornaments. This publication brings together responses to the series from artists SERAFINE1369 and Rehana Zaman and geographer Professor Kathryn Yusoff; exploring layered references to tarot, Shakespeare and post-colonial theory; probing the materiality and extractive politics of geology; and reflecting the plural multifaceted nature of Collings-James’ practice.

A series by Phoebe Collings-James

With Texts by Serafine1369, Rehana Zaman, Kathryn Yussof.

The More-than-Human reader brings together texts that reflect on the state of post-anthropocentric thinking today, by writers from a wide range of disciplines. Focusing on the ecologies and technologies of climate injustice and inequalities, as well as the destructive structures lurking within anthropocentrism, More-than-Human proposes complex entanglements, frictions, and reparative attention across species and beings.

Thinking past the centrality of the human subject, the texts that compose this reader begin to imagine networks of ethics and responsibility emerging not from the ideologies of old, but from the messy and complex liveliness around and beneath us. 

Rather than attempting to be a comprehensive compendium on the topic (which would be virtually impossible), More-than-Human provides a cross-section of the breadth and vitality of a literary, scientific, and conceptual milieu where multiple strands of work intersect even as they are frequently regarded as belonging to separate disciplinary discourses.

Contributors: Stacy Alaimo, Ramon Amaro, Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Octavia Butler, Georges Canguilhem, Marisol de la Cadena, NASA History Department, Silvia Federici, Scott F. Gilbert, Édouard Glissant, Jack Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Myra J. Hird, Kristina Lyons, Patricia MacCormack, John T. Maher, Michael Marder, Timothy Mitchell, Reza Negarastani, Jussi Parikka, Elizabeth Povinelli, Paul B. Preciado, María Puig de la Bellacasa, Filipa Ramos, Isabelle Stengers, Elly R. Truitt, Anna L. Tsing, Eduardo Vivieros de Castro, Jason Wallin, Kathryn Yusoff and Joanna Zylinska.