A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

Summary

A short, dense and often poetic book in which geographer Kathryn Yusoff argues that geology has never been neutral. Its ‘grammar’, she shows, helped build the extractive economies of colonialism and slavery, taking from people as well as the earth. Bringing Black feminist theory into geography and earth science, she retells the Anthropocene’s origin story along the colour line.

Rationale

Of the contexts that shape us, we ask “who does that serve?” Yusoff asks it of geology, and finds its ‘neutral’ categories serving empire, past and present.