A historically grounded and embodied understanding of geological transformation.

A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None could be summed up as a new history of the relationship between geology and subjectivity. This is by no means a novel concern – pre-black conscious writers such as WEB du Bois, black conscious writers including Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko, and their contemporaries and successors, for example Sylvia Wynter, Achille Mbembe and Kathrine McKittrick, have all grappled with the complex human-citizenship-land question. What makes Kathryn Yusoff’s book different is that it addresses these questions via contemporary concerns about the Anthropocene, the name given to the new geological epoch. Unlike previous epochs, such as the Pleistocene, which was marked by climatological planetary impacts – in this case repeated glaciations, which is why it’s also called the Ice Age – the Anthropocene is marked by human interference.

Black studies scholars and geographers interested in the environment and materiality alike are likely to find the text useful in asserting that a grammar of biopolitics cannot adequately account for the social history and present of Black people’s proximity to death, from the silver mines of sixteenth-century Potosí to the toxic environs of late-capitalist US urbanity.

In steering away from specific dates, Yusoff engages with concepts of geologic time by connecting struggles for equity and justice with some of the foundational epistemologies that are normally used to connect historical and physical geology: uniformitarianism, the vastness of time, and the trade of time for location.

Yusoff’s Billion Black Anthropocenes calls to mind this multitude of examples of colonialism and attendant resource exploitation, reminding us that the Anthropocene is simply the latest in a centuries-long string of world destructions enacted by western colonizers.

Yusoff’s A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None charts and unearths the grammar of geology as one that is foundational to and enabling of the extractive economies and histories of colonialism and slavery.

Although Yusoff’s own training is in the earth sciences, the book is as literary as it is geological, bringing together Yusoff’s disciplinary background with an understanding of how literary studies, and particularly Black literary studies, remains a key site in helping imagine the world outside the cycles of environmental destruction, settler colonialism, and anti-Black violence.