Beyond the premise of conquest: Indigenous and Black earth-worlds in the Anthropocene debates

ABSTRACT

This paper interrogates how the two major competing frameworks in the debates over framing our geological epoch – the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene – are unified in the reproduction of a Eurocentric assumption that functions to confirm the historical priority of Euro-Western geological agency, the corollary of which is the rendering derivative of non-European peoples as lacking in such capacity until mobilized by Euro-Western forces. Rather than assume that humanity in general, or colonial capitalism more specifically, has generated a novel geological epoch by disrupting the ‘natural’ temporal divide between deep geological time, medium run biological time, and human history, this paper argues for a more co-constitutive relation between geological, biological, and social space-times. Locating ourselves within an irreducible socio-bio-geological space-time, we re-encounter the earth as multiple earth-worldings co-constituted by Indigenous and Black peoples in ways that precede, and exceed, the hitherto understood to be ‘originary’ geological capacity of Euro-Western colonial capitalism.

KEYWORDS:

• Anthropocene
• Capitalocene
• decolonial
• Eurocentrism
• race
• political ecology

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the conveners of this special issue for inviting me to submit this paper and for helpful feedback. Many of the ideas in this paper have been developed through conversations over the years with Zahir Kolia and Zubairu Wai, and for this I offer them my sincere thanks.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bikrum Gill

Bikrum Gill is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech, where he is also core faculty in ASPECT.