Beyond the premise of conquest: Indigenous and Black earth-worlds in the Anthropocene debates

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper interrogates how the two major competing frameworks in the debates over framing our geological epoch – the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene – are unified in the reproduction of a Eurocentric assumption that functions to confirm the historical priority of Euro-Western geological agency, the corollary of which is the rendering derivative of non-European peoples as lacking in such capacity until mobilized by Euro-Western forces. Rather than assume that humanity in general, or colonial capitalism more specifically, has generated a novel geological epoch by disrupting the ‘natural’ temporal divide between deep geological time, medium run biological time, and human history, this paper argues for a more co-constitutive relation between geological, biological, and social space-times. Locating ourselves within an irreducible socio-bio-geological space-time, we re-encounter the earth as multiple earth-worldings co-constituted by Indigenous and Black peoples in ways that precede, and exceed, the hitherto understood to be ‘originary’ geological capacity of Euro-Western colonial capitalism.