Inhuman Memory by Kathryn Yusoff

If the earth remembers more than it forgets – as a billion blackened Anthropocenes of colonial earth suggest – what is inhuman memory? Can a gritty residue of counter-archives be found in soils, rocks, mounds, as the discourses of materiality organize its forgetting? Does history cling to the world in its erasure, the earth as a collector of disobedience, rebellion, and revolt, claiming time outside the colonial clock? Against an inhuman history of ‘dehumanization and thingification’ (Césaire 1999), this talk will explore how another poetics of the inhuman could redress the colonial afterlives of racial material-spatial practices. This talk maps another cartography of racialized geologies that sees the earth as an archival medium; one that unearths ghost geologies and suggest a way into reparative earth acts.