ANALYSIS: Scholar’s fresh book accuses experts of creating’ geotrauma’
A European professor of “inhuman landscape” links bright power to geologists and archeology – or “pale-ontology”, as she refers to it – in a new book published by Duke University Press.
According to her profile, Kathryn Yusoff, the author of” Geologic life,” is a professor at Queen Mary University of London. Her work focuses on “historical, geophilosophical, and dark female techniques to speak to issues of environmental alter.”
In the book, Yusoff makes the argument that “forms of royal geography embedded in Western and Enlightenment” had created “anti-Black, anti-Indigenous, and anti-Brown economic and cultural injustices”, according to the author’s information.
In her book, Yusoff states in the advantages that the aim of understanding geography as a tool of racism that has previously and continues to design the relationship between racism today.
She thinks that geology began as a” imperial practice that established ethical order of material and destroyed kingdoms.”
One passage in her introduction suggests that racism may be related to paleontology, the study of ancient life through fossils and other methods.
” … paleontology ( pale-ontology ) named and raced persons as geologic subjects through the category of the ‘ inhuman,'” she writes.
Why she wrote “pale-ontology” that means, and if she thinks the name suggests white body and/or white, is a question that Yusoff has never responded to in two letters from The College Fix.
Another passage accuses scientists of creating “geotrauma” by “eras]ing ] geologies that belonged to other thoughts of earth”.
Yusoff writes:” In the register of geological period there are missing rocks. Earths that appear just as a bad inscription, underground, beneath and behind the physical imagination of imperial planet and its discourses of deliberate extraction. Aboriginal rocks. Black earths. Colored proterozoic”.
According to her book, this” colonial world” was created through” white geology,” and it is a “historical regime of material power that used geologic minerals, metals, and fuels, combined with the epistemic violence of the category of the inhuman to form regimes of value and forms of personal life.
Her writing suggests that white supremacist schemes have also corrupted rocks.
” To tell a story of rocks is to account for a eugenic materialism in which white supremacy made surfaces built on racialized undergrounds across multiple—political, geophysical, subjective—states”, Yusoff writes.
She also ties gold, iron, and other metals to racism, arguing that” Africans and Africa were constructed as the abundance necessary for extraction”. And their “muscle and strength were fetishized as persons were degraded”, she writes.
The professor’s assertions that oppression and the hard sciences are similar are not entirely unheard.
Concerns about” too rock heavy” and faculty not being sufficiently diverse were raised by a survey of American students majoring in geosciences in 2023.
A biology professor at Williams College recently expressed concern that students are increasingly displaying “ideological intolerance in the science classroom.”
One example she gave was” a marked increase in students asking for’ trigger-warnings’ for’ offensive content’ such as … the use of the word’ dyke’ in geology, not as slur on lesbians, but as a technical term (‘ dyke’ is a layer of rock cutting into another layer )”, The Fix reported in 2022.
MORE: Geologist field camps criticized as reliving Manifest Destiny, conquest
IMAGE: Queen Mary University, Duke University Press
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