Notes on “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None” by Kathryn Yusoff.
Undoing the world. The major event of civilisation is settler colonialism, Yusoff proposes in her acute analysis of western Geology’s foundational part to legitimising European imperialism. She proposes that by geologizing the subjectivities of black lives, through racialisation and inhumanisation of blackness, extractive infastructures were put in place without ethical complications. The genocide and slavery of people of colour in the beginnings of Empire were made legitimate by constructing a hierarchy of race that Yusoff proposes is a central component to the category of the human.
The “inhuman” category formed through the enslaved of African people into violent infastructures of extraction, beginning the mass production of coal, gold, sugar and cotton to kick start the European empire cities. Infastructures of resource extraction to provide for the comfort of white people. Pain au chocolat. Look at France’s breakfast tradition. Caffeine, sugar, butter, wheat. Chaining the people of the Earth for “pleasure”, a pleasure that is comfort, that is unfeeling the pain ravaging behind the empire. Caffeine, sugar, fat and gluten in excess surpress emotional intensity. Caffeine and sugar also fueled the British working class as they began to enter the coal mines. The pleasures of the bourgeousie was exported to the masses as external infastrucures elsewhere are sped up by technological progress. That means, the British working class gets a taste of the Captain’s healm of the terrible big ship. We are trying to jump inside the ship. Is there space for everyone? As in, destroy the ship, it’s terrible inside. Tea and cake does not replace the intensity and richness of corporeal entanglenment and feeling. I suggest that to recognise the suffering and grief alongside this empire is the only way to understand our next steps, out of hell. I’m griefcentric. This is not to romanticise the experiences of suffering as an experience of awareness, because the threshhold of violence to people of colour historically means genocide. Death leaves no space for a richness of feeling. We need to recognise exploitation, but not validate it. Validate survival as a signpost for change. Most interesting culture in the West comes from its silenced most exploited inhumanised populations, a meeting of trauma and understanding that produces richness. Since nectrophiliacs do not write great music. So to exit, is to listen to other voices that may sing the tip of grief, but realise this is a call for change, not to glorify and take the song, not to wear the song when we want to feel richness.
Does Yusoff blanket caucasian people in these terminologies of race? Many populations in Europe have experiences genocide and cultural devastation during the expansion of large Imperial powers such as Britain and France. Imagining solidarity between Ireland, Wales and Brittany, for example. Can this solidarity expand towards people of colour, as a resonance of experiences, or are these dynamics of colonialism very different? It was African people who were enslaved and traded for gold, and this intense history of suffering is rich for appropriation by those guilty enough. Growing up in Ireland we listened to African American hip-hop, while mute to racism in our own country. Historically, Irish people quickly assimiliated into whiteness while emigrating to the US during the ends of the Irish famine, and following Ireland’s step into whiteness is has become one of the richest countries in the world per capita. Solidarity is crucial, whereas the appropriation of grief is to protect the status quo.
These questions may stem for a desire to define the human, which in my understanding has been a theme in my music composition which I often define as “anthropological storytelling.” Who’s the human? There’s a strong desire for me to hold onto my humanism, but it also comes steeped with a melancholia, an unfullfillment, meaning the humanism is an idealism, a belief. May be a wildness that we can imagine, beyond the boat, beyond structure, fluid, chaos, yet something else, love. Love without grief is a poor love, a fake love. Love without recognising the suffering is not love, but active ignorance. The cultures of love or institutions of love go from scary music to soft nice music as they transition from confrontation to sedation. I want confrontation yet not the coolness of it, not obsessing darkness, acknowledging and still holding the love. Love is courage is grief. When I thought I wanted out of theory, black studies has transformed my imaginaries and widened the intensities, stimulating a question of action.