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In Geontologies Elizabeth A. Povinelli continues her project of mapping the current conditions of late liberalism by offering a bold retheorization of power. Finding Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance, Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus. Geontologies examines this formation of power from the perspective of Indigenous Australian maneuvers against the settler state. And it probes how our contemporary critical languages-anthropogenic climate change, plasticity, new materialism, antinormativity-often unwittingly transform their struggles against geontopower into a deeper entwinement within it. A woman who became a river, a snakelike entity who spawns the fog, plesiosaurus fossils and vast networks of rock weirs: in asking how these different forms of existence refuse incorporation into the vocabularies of Western theory Povinelli provides a revelatory new way to understand a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism but now becoming visible much further beyond.
In Geontologies Elizabeth A. Povinelli continues her project of mapping the current conditions of late liberalism by offering a bold retheorization of power. Finding Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance, Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus. Geontologies examines this formation of power from the perspective of Indigenous Australian maneuvers against the settler state. And it probes how our contemporary critical languages-anthropogenic climate change, plasticity, new materialism, antinormativity-often unwittingly transform their struggles against geontopower into a deeper entwinement within it. A woman who became a river, a snakelike entity who spawns the fog, plesiosaurus fossils and vast networks of rock weirs: in asking how these different forms of existence refuse incorporation into the vocabularies of Western theory Povinelli provides a revelatory new way to understand a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism but now becoming visible much further beyond.
Acknowledgments x
1. The Three Figures of Geontology 1
2. Can Rocks Die? Life and Death inside the Carbon Imaginary
30
3. The Fossils and the Bones 57
4. The Normativity of Creeks 92
5. The Fog of Meaning and the Voiceless Demos 118
6. Downloading the Dreaming 144
7. Late Liberal Geontopower 168
Notes 179
Bibliography 195
Index 209
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University and the author of, most recently, Economies of Abandonment: Social Belonging and Endurance in Late Liberalism, also published by Duke University Press.
"Geontologies is a dense work that resists being described in
telegraphic terms, based as it is in dazzling and far-reaching
theoretical and philosophical readings. But Povinelli’s key
concepts of 'geontology' and 'geontopower' are an
invaluable contribution to our much-needed critical lexicon, [and]
the concepts and modes of engagement presented
in Geontologies, though firmly rooted in the experience and
particular governance of Australian settler late liberalism, demand
to be taken up and translated in other contexts."
*Avery Review*
"Geontologies may well inspire new possibilities for thinking,
relating and being."
*Australian Aboriginal Studies*
“Geontologies is a challenging, exhilarating, and terrifying read.
Challenging and exhilarating for all those interested in what deep
ethnographic inquiry has to offer to a broad range of contemporary
philosophy and social theory. And terrifying and exhilarating for
those who find themselves asking whether the drama of Life’s
possible extinction really matters.”
*Anthropological Quarterly*
"Short, conceptually packed . . . a rewarding read that will keep
reverberating."
*Journal of Anthropological Research*
"Geontologies contributes valuably . . . offering a sophisticated
account of the Australian context as well as analytic tools and
vocabulary to continue the work elsewhere."
*Social & Cultural Geography*
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