“Guano in Their Destiny”: Race, Geology, and a Philosophy of Indenture

Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession, disasters, justice, and repair across the Caribbean archipelago

“…Which is an existence of forced detachment from ancestral geographies, political exception, and systematic socio-ecological rupture. Such examinations excavate “the layers of bones” that “become ossified in the bedrock” underneath “extractive imperialism” (Goffe 2019, 29–30). These critiques expose how the Anthropocene and Capitalocene are analytically anemic for a historiography of global ecological crisis, to say nothing of the socio-cultural crises of modernity's racialism.…”

Aporias at the intersection of geography and feminist science and technology studies: Critical engagements with Black studies

“…Barra (2021) uses ethnography to describe the intersection of race and sediment politics in Coastal Louisiana, weaving together political ecology, Black geographies, and FSTS to argue that contemporary environmental injustices around sediment management in the Delta are produced through the intertwinement of race and geologic thinking that renders Black bodies as inhuman and equatable with rocks, soils, and sediment. In this vein, Goffe (2019) examines the materiality of anti-Chinese racism in 19th-century Latin American guano extraction as a form of "racial sedimentation" in which Chinese bones are literally and figuratively calcified as geological substrate. She asks how histories of colonial and capitalist logics of accumulation might be reexamined through geological processes that account for sedimented life, unsettling divisions between living and non-living, human and nonhuman.…”