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A review by jacquesdevilliers
A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None by Kathryn Yusoff
2.0
Yusoff's volume, slim in length but a slog in syntax, has an important thesis, which I agree with. She interrogates the recent concern over humanity's degradation of planet Earth, 'our' overbearing influence, for which the name 'anthropocene' has been coined. Her beef is (thankfully) not over whether climate change is real or not. It's with the designation that 'we' (that is, all of humanity) are to blame, as opposed to a predominantly white global minority who, through colonialism and global capitalism, have deformed both the world and its peoples into the environmental catastrophe that now confronts us (yes, this time it is all of us). In other words, Yusoff's beef is with what discourse about the Anthropocene leave out, namely a history of colonialism, slavery, and ongoing racialised exploitation:
[At the centre of] the Anthropocene is anti-Blackness; it is racialised matter that delivers the Anthropocene as a geologic event into the world, through mining, plantations, railroads, labor, and energy. While Blackness is the energy and flesh of the Anthropocene, it is excluded from the wealth of its accumulation. Rather, Blackness must absorb the excess of that surplus as toxicity, pollution, and intensification of storms. Again and again.
Yusoff works essentially in the mode of post-structuralist critique, arguing that centuries of anti-Black violence are written out of a conception of the anthropocene even while they constitute its centre. Moreover, Yusoff argues that the logic that led to environmental degradation is complicit with the language of racism, the latter of which was used to justify colonialism and slavery. Both are predicated on a distinction between the human and the non-human, of objectifying life. Whether it be 'virgin' territory, forests, grown crops, or black Africans forced to endure the middle passage, these could all be relegated to the status of property: life subjugated to the status of a commodity to be bought, sold, and worked over by those who designated themselves both human and their owners. In the process these lives - Black, vegetal, indigenous, enslaved... - were wrecked.
This is an argument for which a great deal of historical support can be mustered. To take but one example: racist discourse over the centuries tied 'the natives' to the environments in which they were 'found', sometimes causing them to disappear entirely, such that European settlers could claim they found a depopulated land in which they were the first inhabitants. And one need only consider (as too many too seldom do) that the uncountable murder of non-European lives stains the four corners of the earth upon which capitalism and industrialism expanded to global proportions. The lives of the wretched of the earth were felled and continue to fall along with the environment of the earth.
And yet Yusoff's demonstration of this convergence is hit and miss. A particularly egregious example is her critique of a mid-19th-century geologist who harboured racist views. From his being both a geologist and racist, Yusoff motivates for geology being complicit in and providing the dehumanising language for racism. But just because a practicing geologist happened to have racist views is hardly evidence to link the field of geology with racism. I found little in Yusoff's quotations that provided a specifically geological bent in her geologist's ideology. It maps onto the typically teleological thinking of the time, which classed Africans behind Europeans on a racetrack of human development, and could therefore be found in a broad spectrum of educated Europeans of his class. It hardly started or found its main proponent in geology. Maybe I've been spoiled by all the Eric Hobsbawm I've been reading lately, but Yusoff's critique of historical sources falls short for me.
But my main frustration has to do with how little Yusoff does with her premise. She draws on figures - Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Achille Mbembe, the recent school of Afro-Pessimist thought - who have laid out the argument for the fungibility of black life, its uneasy oscillation between the status of human and non-human, being and non-being. Yusoff relocates this argument in the context of environmental catastrophe. But she doesn't bring anything fundamentally new to it. How do environmentalist and Anthropocene contexts alter these arguments about the ways in which Black lives do and don't matter? Instead we have the arguments of Yusoff's sources in a new location, largely unaltered.
All in all, something of a missed opportunity.
[At the centre of] the Anthropocene is anti-Blackness; it is racialised matter that delivers the Anthropocene as a geologic event into the world, through mining, plantations, railroads, labor, and energy. While Blackness is the energy and flesh of the Anthropocene, it is excluded from the wealth of its accumulation. Rather, Blackness must absorb the excess of that surplus as toxicity, pollution, and intensification of storms. Again and again.
Yusoff works essentially in the mode of post-structuralist critique, arguing that centuries of anti-Black violence are written out of a conception of the anthropocene even while they constitute its centre. Moreover, Yusoff argues that the logic that led to environmental degradation is complicit with the language of racism, the latter of which was used to justify colonialism and slavery. Both are predicated on a distinction between the human and the non-human, of objectifying life. Whether it be 'virgin' territory, forests, grown crops, or black Africans forced to endure the middle passage, these could all be relegated to the status of property: life subjugated to the status of a commodity to be bought, sold, and worked over by those who designated themselves both human and their owners. In the process these lives - Black, vegetal, indigenous, enslaved... - were wrecked.
This is an argument for which a great deal of historical support can be mustered. To take but one example: racist discourse over the centuries tied 'the natives' to the environments in which they were 'found', sometimes causing them to disappear entirely, such that European settlers could claim they found a depopulated land in which they were the first inhabitants. And one need only consider (as too many too seldom do) that the uncountable murder of non-European lives stains the four corners of the earth upon which capitalism and industrialism expanded to global proportions. The lives of the wretched of the earth were felled and continue to fall along with the environment of the earth.
And yet Yusoff's demonstration of this convergence is hit and miss. A particularly egregious example is her critique of a mid-19th-century geologist who harboured racist views. From his being both a geologist and racist, Yusoff motivates for geology being complicit in and providing the dehumanising language for racism. But just because a practicing geologist happened to have racist views is hardly evidence to link the field of geology with racism. I found little in Yusoff's quotations that provided a specifically geological bent in her geologist's ideology. It maps onto the typically teleological thinking of the time, which classed Africans behind Europeans on a racetrack of human development, and could therefore be found in a broad spectrum of educated Europeans of his class. It hardly started or found its main proponent in geology. Maybe I've been spoiled by all the Eric Hobsbawm I've been reading lately, but Yusoff's critique of historical sources falls short for me.
But my main frustration has to do with how little Yusoff does with her premise. She draws on figures - Saidiya Hartman, Christina Sharpe, Achille Mbembe, the recent school of Afro-Pessimist thought - who have laid out the argument for the fungibility of black life, its uneasy oscillation between the status of human and non-human, being and non-being. Yusoff relocates this argument in the context of environmental catastrophe. But she doesn't bring anything fundamentally new to it. How do environmentalist and Anthropocene contexts alter these arguments about the ways in which Black lives do and don't matter? Instead we have the arguments of Yusoff's sources in a new location, largely unaltered.
All in all, something of a missed opportunity.