Acknowledgments

This work started out as a response to a call from Angela Last, who organized a workshop on “Decolonizing the Anthropocene” in 2015. The ideas and text have metamorphosed many times since, in response to attendance at too many Anthropocene events, where the absence of discussions of race allowed the smooth flow of patriarchal reason to make its earth anew. The citation practice I have followed reflects these absences. My aim in this book was to open a space for these critical discussions about race and geology, because women, especially women of color, if citation practices are to be believed, do not write theories of the earth, and if the same citation practices are to be adhered to, they don’t write much of anything, expect their own erasure! Specifically, I am grateful for invitations from Astrida Neimanis and Jennifer Mae Hamilton (Sydney University, “Hacking the Anthropocene: Feminist, Queer and Anticolonial Propositions,” April 2016), Rory Rowan (University of Zurich, “The Anthropocene between Earth and Social Sciences,” November 2016), Jody Dean (Fisher Center for the Study of Women and Men, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, “Gender, Climate, and the Anthropocene,” February 2016), the New Materialism Conference (Paris UNESCO, “Environmental Humanities and New Materialisms: The Ethics of Decolonizing Nature and Culture,” June 2017), Andrew Baldwin (Durham University, December 2017), and the London Group of Historical Geographers (Institute for Historical Research, November 2017). I am especially grateful for helpful comments on and critical responses to this work as I learned my way through the literatures of black studies and geology. A special shout-out to Stephanie Springgay and Sarah E. Truman for the sprint to issue me with my “queer trails” badge in Paris. I am grateful to the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, where I read Sylvia Wynter’s extraordinary “Black Metamorphosis” and James Baldwin’s essays, and to the archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and the incredible National Museum of African American History and Culture. The team at University of Minnesota Press have been enthusiastic throughout this process, and especial thanks are due to Dani Kasprzak, Jason Weidman, and Anne Carter. The text was finally written up during a fellowship at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Durham University. Without that concentrated time and the fine fellowship encountered there, this work would never have been made into this (small) book. For friendship and food during the storms, thanks are due to Lisa, Andrew, Lorcan and Torin, Amanda and Pete, Robyn, and, in Durham, the “Fellows,” Divya Tolia-Kelly, Siobhán McGrath, Elizabeth Johnson, and Andrew Baldwin. Thinking with shapes where the writing ends up. For keeping the fires burning and the humor sharp in the End of the World “comms,” I thank Jennifer Gabrys, Tim Pearn, Myra Hird, Nigel Clark, Angela Last, and Stephanie Wakefield. In its most joyous releases and subterranean modes, thought is a conversation made on the shuttle back and forth. I have had the pleasure of having longtime interlocutors about the inhuman in Nigel Clark and Myra Hird, and the deep-time provocations of Mary Thomas have changed that thinking in all its orientations.