A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None Quotes

“The Anthropocene might seem to offer a dystopic future that laments the end of the world, but imperialism and ongoing (settler) colonialisms have been ending worlds for as long as they have been in existence. The Anthropocene as a politically infused geology and scientific/popular discourse is just now noticing the extinction it has chosen to continually overlook in the making of its modernity and freedom.”
― Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

“That is, racialization belongs to a material categorization of the division of matter (corporeal and mineralogical) into active and inert.”
― Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

“This attempt to absolve the positionality of Western colonial knowledge and extraction practices, while simultaneously reinforcing and resettling them in a new territory—a Western frontier of pioneers armed with eco-optimism and geoengineering—indicates a desire to overcome coloniality without a corresponding relinquishing of the power it continues to generate in terms of who gets to formulate, implement, and speak to/of the future.”
― Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

“The racial categorization of Blackness shares its natality with mining the New World, as does the material impetus for colonialism in the first instance. This means that the idea of Blackness and the displacement and eradication of indigenous peoples get caught and defined in the ontological wake of geology. The human and its subcategory, the inhuman, are historically relational to a discourse of settler-colonial rights and the material practices of extraction, which is to say that the categorization of matter is a spatial execution, of place, land, and person cut from relation through geographic displacement (and relocation through forced settlement and transatlantic slavery). That is, racialization belongs to a material categorization of the division of matter (corporeal and mineralogical) into active and inert. Extractable matter must be both passive (awaiting extraction and possessing of properties) and able to be activated through the mastery of white men.”
― Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

“As Brand (2001, 82) reminds us, there is no ground zero in relation; “it never occurs to them that they live on the cumulative hurt of others. They want to start the clock of social justice only when they arrive. But one is born into history, one isn’t born into a void.”
― Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

“Slavery is not a by-product of this process; rather, slavery is driven by an indifferent extractive geo-logic that is motivated by the desire for inhuman properties.”
― Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

“In the nonconsensual collaboration with inhuman materiality as both a property of energy and in concert with other energy sources (sugar, coal, mineral), slavery weaponized the redistribution of energy around the globe through the flesh of black bodies.”
― Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

“An idea of a Black Anthropocene poses the question as a redescription of the Anthropocene through the racializing assemblage from which it emerged, rather than claiming a space for Blackness within or outside the Anthropocene”
― Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

“Precisely because modernity (and premodernity) is secured in a subjectivity that is inscripted at the onset in race, the diagnostic of the Anthropocene does not unleash any ethical crisis in liberal discourse about who is targeted by these material practices. What is at stake and what is on the front line are defined through the color line. The disembodied monuments and matter of the Golden Spike point but don’t name. This is why the Anthropocene is configured in a future tense rather than in recognition of the extinctions already undergone by black and indigenous peoples.”
― Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None

“In an act of intrusion, I seek to undermine the givenness of geology as an innocent or natural description of the world, to see its modes of inscription and circulation as a doubling of the notion of property—property as a description of mineralogy and property as an acquisition (as resource, land, extractive quality of energy or mineral).”
― Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None