Broken Grounds: Geology, Race and Counter-Gravities

In this episode, host Susan Mathews is in conversation with Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of
Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London. Her transdisciplinary research
addresses the colonial afterlives of geology and race as a site of planetary transformation and
social change. Her research is published in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or
None (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) and Geologic Life: Inhuman intimacies and the
Geophysics of Race (Duke University Press, 2024).

The conversation centres around the science of geology and its epistemic and field
practices. In her book Geologic Life, Yusoff notes that geology, which emerged in the late
fifteenth through nineteenth centuries as a Eurocentric field of scientific inquiry, was a form
of earth writing riven by systemic racism, complicit in the building of colonial worlds and the
destruction of existing earths. The origin stories of earth and scripts of race are natal twins.
Both mineralogical material and the subjugated person, such as on racial lines, were
categorized as ‘inhuman’. She approaches this work not through a linear historical geography
but through undergounds (as footnote, mine, appendix, subtending strata, and stolen suns)
that reveal subterranean currents.

Part of the task is to bring this whiteness down to earth through counter-gravities such as
insurgent geology, non-fossil histories and questioning stratification. Broadly, Black, Brown,
and Indigenous subjects whose location is the rift have an intimacy with the earth that is
unknown to the structural position of whiteness. This inhuman intimacy represents another
kind of geo-power: the tactics of the earthbound. So, whether it be through growing food, or making music such as the Blues, or the earth as a revolutionary compatriot, there have
always been persistent resistances against these racialized relations.

Yusoff speaks of the paradigm of the mine, which encapsulates this presumption of
extraction. She speaks of how material value is stabilized in the present from skyscrapers to
palm plantations, but both inhuman mineral “resources” and subjugated labouring people are
relegated to the underground. The mine has also inspired carceral forms such as the prison
complex.

For a more reparative geophysics, we need to embrace practices that don’t start from the
division between bios and geos and actually understand the earth and minerals as part of a
kin relationship with a more expansive understanding of how the human comes into being.
The separation between biology and geology is purely a kind of historical effect of disciplines
and disciplining practices. These changes are even more important in the Anthropocene,
where we have what she terms as a “white man’s overburden” with tech bros or
predominantly White Western men deciding the future of Earth. Geobiology is a relational
affair, and we need to see geology as a praxis of struggle and earth as iterative and
archiving of those struggles.

The Subverse is the podcast of Dark ‘n’ Light, a digital space that chronicles the times we live in and reimagining futures with a focus on science, nature, social justice and culture. Follow us on social media @darknlightzine for episode details and show notes.