A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. By Kathryn Yusoff

Abstract

In geographer Kathryn Yusoff’s audacious challenge to contemporary studies of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, “Black and brown death is the precondition of every Anthropocene origin story” (66). In this brief study, which approaches popular discourse surrounding the Anthropocene and early writings of White geology vis-a-vis Black feminist thinkers, Yusoff argues that the Anthropocene is a political geology invested in the maintenance of slavery’s extractive afterlives that deploys universal grammars of the human and an allegiance to politically neutered observations of the “natural” planet. Following Sylvia Wynter’s assertion that the New World and its coterminous ecological disasters began in 1452, Yusoff considers the violent dispersal of enslaved Africans as the critical “Anthropogenesis” willfully neglected by modern geology (25). Her figuration of the Blackened (in)human-cum-possession as a “golden spike,” or geologic marker created by global change that marks the beginning of the Anthropocene/Capitalocene (and its prefiguration in the Plantationocene), rightly indicts liberal-humanists who mourn “the new geochemical earth” while the indigenous dispossession and objectification of the Black which the project of enlightenment was predicated upon remains unthought (13).