The Inhumanities

This article proposes the inhumanities as an analytic to address the material confluences of race and environment in the epistemic construction of the humanities and social sciences. As the Anthropocene represents an explicit formation of political geology, from its inception as a means to frame a crisis of environmental conditions to the characterization of future trajectories of extinction, I argue that centering race is a way to reconceptualize and challenge the disciplinary approaches of the humanities, humanism, and the Anthropocene (e.g., the environmental humanities and geohumanities1). Foregrounding the conjoined historic geographies of racialization and ecological transformation through the discipline of geology, within the context of colonial and settler colonial extractivism, sets the conditions for thinking materially about decolonization as a geologic process. I make three interconnected points about the Anthropocene and inhumanities. First, the Anthropocene names a new field of geologically informed power relations that focus attention on the geographies of the inhuman, geologic forces, and the politics of nonlife. Second, the framing of the inhumanities forces a reckoning with the humanist liberal subject that orders the humanities: an invisible and indivisible white subject position that curates racialized geographies of environmental concern, impact, and futurity. Third, the inhumanities makes visible the historic double life of the inhuman as both matter and as a subjective racial category of colonial geographies and its extractive afterlives. In conclusion, I consider the emergence of geopower as a political technology of racial capitalism and governance of the present. Geopower, I argue, is the product of historical geologies of race that subtend a particular form of life marked by extractivism enacted on racialized geosocial strata.