Foreclosures of Liberty
White Geology makes legible a set of extractions, from particular subject positions, from black and brown bodies, and from the ecologies of place. The collective functioning of geologic languages coded–inhuman, property, value, possession–as categories moves across territory, relation, and flesh. It is not just that geology is a signifier for extraction but that a transmutation of matter occurs within that signification that renders matter as property, that makes a delineation between agency and inertness, which stabilizes the cut of property and enacts the removal of matter from its constitutive relations as both subject and mineral embedded in sociological and ecological fields. Thus I argue that the semiotics of White Geology creates atemporal materiality dislocated from place and time–a mythology of disassociation in the formation of matter independent of its languages of description and the historical constitution of its social relations (4-5).
Shafer’s photographs visualize Yusoff’s interrogation laying bare the contradictions and foreclosures inherent in American ideas of freedom and liberty, finding as does Yusoff, that the ideological apparatus of colonizing power infiltrates nearly every facet of the system. As Yusoff notes, “Aptly, capturing the geomatrix of racial formations and land dispossession under colonialism, W. E. B. Du Bois (1920, 54) defined Whiteness as the ‘ownership of the Earth for ever and ever’” (26). Moreover, Yusoff keenly identifies, and Untitled (Edith) then visualizes, a crucial intersection between sexism, patriarchy, and the ubiquity of colonial power, explaining that “the colonial assumption for the responsibility for and of the world is articulated anew as the white man’s burden–a paternalism that is tied to a redemptive narrative of saving the world from harm on account of others while maintaining the protective thick skin of innocence” (27). In this way Yusoff contends with the lies and manipulations deployed by the U.S. government to vanquish Indigenous peoples and their cultures at the hands of poor whites who themselves had been forsaken by a landed elite concerned with little more than their own economic gain.