A BILLION BLACK ANTHROPOCENES OR NONE - KATHRYN YUSOFF

This is a buzzy little book from a few years ago that I’d had on the docket for a while. It’s quite short, and in many ways seems like it’s the outline for something much longer or an expanded version of a much shorter speech or manifesto. Yusoff, who has the incredible job title of “Professor of Inhuman Geography,” does us all a favor and goes after the term “Anthropocene” a new-ish term that you hear all the time now. As she puts it, “Naming can also be a covering over” and she wants to investigate what exactly that term is hiding. The Anthro, in Anthropocene seems, like in the term anthropology, to be gesturing towards humanity in general, as if there’s something inherent in our humanness that is causing the earth to heat up and the climate to change. Obviously, this isn’t true. There’s something very specific that humanity, and more specifically a certain racialized subsection of humanity, has been doing, for a limited amount of time, ie Capitalism and the imperialism and slavery that birthed and sustained it, that is causing these catastrophic changes. Yusoff is trying to highlight how the processes that created climate change and the Anthropocene were birthed in trans-Atlantic slave trade and ingenious genocides, which shares an extractive logic with the way we now treat the earth itself. As she puts it,  “Slavery and genocide are the urtext to discussion of species and geology, their empirical bedrock and epistemological anchor.” This is all very useful stuff and an important re-framing to the idea of an “anthropocene.” She’s not the first to suggest another term to replace Anthropocene, we’ve also got Capitalocene from Jason Moore, Chthulthcene from Donna Haraway, Plantationocene from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, and (not mentioned in this book) the Psychozoic from Joseph le Conte all of which seek to complicated the trite suggestions of inevitability behind the term Anthropocene. While this is a very useful point to make, the book itself is quite dense and academic, even for something so short. She’s heavy of citations, especially from Sylvia Wynter, whom I adore, but for something that should be bit-sized and who’s main idea is somewhat simple and in desperate need of widespread popularity (we’re not going to solve this problem if we don’t understand it’s true nature), it seems like it would put a lot of people off and be seen as so much jargon. I’m not one to complain about academic-y jargon or theory-speak in general, just look at my glowing review of Spinal Catastrophism, and I liked this book a lot, but the stuff she’s talking about is, frankly, quite important this would be a tragedy if people weren’t engaging with these ideas because their written in this style. This isn’t her fault, nor is it her job to write in any particular way, but I do hope someone comes along and makes these ideas more mainstream. On billion black anthropocenes