How the Earth Feels: Geological Fantasy in the Nineteenth-Century United States (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise)

In How the Earth Feels Dana Luciano examines the impacts of the new science of geology on nineteenth-century US culture. Drawing on early geological writings, Indigenous and settler accounts of earthquakes, African American antislavery literature, and other works, Luciano reveals how geology catalyzed transformative conversations regarding the intersections between humans and the nonhuman world. She shows that understanding the earth’s history geologically involved confronting the dynamic nature of inorganic matter over vast spans of time, challenging preconceived notions of human agency. Nineteenth-century Americans came to terms with these changes through a fusion of fact and imagination that Luciano calls geological fantasy. Geological fantasy transformed the science into a sensory experience, sponsoring affective and even erotic connections to the matter of the earth. At the same time, it was often used to justify accounts of evolution that posited a modern, civilized, and Anglo-American whiteness as the pinnacle of human development. By tracing geology’s relationship with biopower, Luciano illuminates how imagined connections with the earth shaped American dynamics of power, race, and colonization. Summary:"By the start of the nineteenth century, the impact of the geological sciences and advancements in the field had radically expanded people's perception of the Earth's age. In How the Earth Feels, Dana Luciano maps the emergence of a "geological fantasy," in which increased knowledge of planetary life was used to racialize Native peoples as fossils and curiosities. Further, the geological fantasy served to cement the notion that the Earth had been preparing for the presence of humans, and that humans were in fact the ultimate expression of the Earth's teleological development in a both scientific and spiritual sense. Counterposing a range of texts-from early European and US geological texts to Indigenous accounts of earthquakes to African American men's anti-slavery writing featuring geological tropes-Luciano reveals the workings of the geological fantasy as it operated across the racial and biopolitical discourses of the nineteenth-century United States. Luciano offers a rich and historically nuanced account of how imagined relations with the non-human world have long served as a means of avoiding engagement with the dynamics of racial and colonial power"-- Provided by publisher Cover Contents Acknowledgments Introduction. The “Fashionable Science” 1. “The Infinite Go-Before of the Present”: Geological Time, Worldmaking, and Race in the Nineteenth Century 2. Unsettled Ground: Indigenous Prophecy, Geological Fantasy, and the New Madrid Earthquakes 3. Romancing the Trace: Ichnology, Affect, Matter 4. Matters of Spirit: Vibrant Materiality and White Femme Geophilia 5. The Natural History of Freedom: Blackness, Geomorphology, Worldmaking Coda. Ishmael’s Anthropocene: Geological Fantasy in the Twenty-First Century Notes Bibliography Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z