Achille Mbembe
Kathryn Yusoff
Day three of our Annual International Conference had another packed programme with 228 sessions happening across 38 stages, both online and in person.
Journal and publisher sponsored sessions continued with Area, holding the second of its three sponsored sessions on working with the spoken word. The Journal of Geography in Higher Education held a session on how to get published in the journal and Edward Elgar publishing also held a session titled Meet the publishers. The Transport Geography Research Group hosted the annual Brian Hoyle lecture, with Bert van Wee talking on Recent Advances in Transport Geography, with a focus on accessibility and travel behaviour. This evening the British Academy are also holding their lecture, with Gillian Rose talking to the title Seeing the city digitally: from picturing urban spaces to animating urban life. One further highlight from this morning was the session, Stay Home Stories, in which five papers shared research into the emotional geographies of home, gathered over the last 18 months.
The first plenary of the day was delivered by Achille Mbembe, who shared several observations on what has come to be known as ‘the planetary’. The talk began with a clarification on terms that are used to categorise the planetary, such as ‘the earth’, ‘the world’, ‘the planet’ and older categories such as the ‘cosmos’ and the ‘universe’. For Achille, the planetary should not just encompass the physical world (its geology, geography, environment), but also all the living things that make it up too, as well as ideas, thoughts, memories, and beliefs. The living world is a process, one with no ending. Because we are all involved in this form of the planetary, it provides a basis for a global ‘in-commonness’.
Achille then talked through some observations about the contemporary state of this planetary in-commonness, particularly in relation to the ways technology has expanded to not only fill our lives, but to create whole new worlds, in the form of platforms. As Achille said, “We now search for information on Google, and shop on Amazon. These are not just practices, but entire ecosystems.” These technologies then merge with capitalism and its excesses to surround all life, with almost all of our actions now being governed within the framework of capitalism and technology - through this, people, and the planet are shaped and transformed. The clearest example of this is in ‘the platform’ which serves to construct and shape whole worlds with the sole intention of exchanging goods or services for money.
These observations therefore lead to a sense that, in the contemporary world, technology has taken on a quasi-religious significance. Technology is about salvation (living forever), it also believes in transcendence, and both technology and religion seek a move towards transhumanism. There is also a move towards the increased computation of life itself, with algorithms trying to capture almost all aspects of it. Equally, algorithms that draw inspiration from the natural world are also on the rise, but life always exceeds these attempts to compute it. It is chaotic and messy, and in the era of the Anthropocene and techno-libertarianism, we will need to seek out these other forms of life; other paradigms that resist these movements are needed more than ever. Finding them, will require, looking into planetary archives that have yet to be explored.
The afternoon saw a range of sessions, including Geography and public policy: The past and present borders of applied geography (sponsored by Space and Policy), which drew on a large panel to question the intellectual heritage of debates on geography and public policy. This historically informed reflection is intended to guide geography through both the risks and opportunities of engaging with policy, particularly given the relevance of geography to current global challenges.
Social media remained abuzz with activity today:
The evening keynote was given by Kathryn Yusoff, who spoke to the title Colonialism Now: Unearthing Geologies of Race. The talk started with a reading from Kathryn’s new book, which seeks to bring together the grammars that construct both race, colonialism, and geophysics. Colonialism and geology are integrated epistemic structures, both are about breaking ground and extracting value from places and both rely on a distanced way of thinking, knowing and acting. ‘Natural resources’ as a term for instance, seeks to structure the world into something out there, laid down, and ready to be taken and used. Colonies are seen in much the same way, as ‘natural resources’ ready to be taken and used, devoid of human life. Geology structured the original colonial features - colonies were imposed to extract natural resources. These factors, colonialism and geology, and their extractive logics, have both been at the forefront of the Anthropocene, global warming and mass extinction.
These logics also structure race, framing it as a category with explanatory power, rather than as an outcome of the misallocation of resources. Where colonialism seeks to create normative structures, decolonial movements seek to disrupt this. They move from extraction to consent, from resource to relation. They seek to tell new stories, which move beyond the ways in which we think about value. In undoing this, they therefore disrupt ideas of race, revaluing Black bodies away from the extractive logics of slavery, servitude, incarcerate, and resource – Black bodies as matter, as inhuman – towards something that is more human and more humane.
Yet crucially race, land extraction, and climate change are all interlinked. They are experienced by the same people under colonialism, meaning these people will always be on the front line, no matter what the fight. This is a subjugating move under the logics of colonialism. It positions Black and Brown bodies in particular ways, creating subjective ‘strata’ upon which Black experiences are laid down. There are countless examples of these extractive industries being forced onto racialised bodies and lands around the world - each is specific but follows the same logics.
Through understanding the ways in which these logics work, we can start to understand the ways in which race becomes constructed, and this is one way in which to move out of the current ways in which race, and blackness in particular, is framed and structured in relation to whiteness. Understanding this, gives us one way towards an undoing of these structures, but in order to do this fully, we need to de-centralise the extractive industries and the logics they carry with them from our intellectual disciplines, including geology, geophysics and geography, creating new ways of thinking and acting when theorising and practicing our worlds.
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