Inhuman reparations and Caribbean “new materialists”

Keynote lecture Inhuman reparations and Caribbean “new materialists”, by Professor Kathryn Yusoff (Queen Mary University of London). 

This paper starts with a simple question: where and how do reparations take place? Wherein place or environment are understood as a constitutive dimension of being and becoming a political subject. How are diasporic geographies, environmental and mineralogical cosmologies involved in the question of reparations? Colonialism is an environmental or geophysical event as much as a political geography; one that has been fractured through racialised geologic formations (such as the mine, plantation and climate change); and thus, the arrangements of materialities, materialisms and matter are implicated in political sovereignty and colonial debt relations.

Firstly, I will discuss who is the subject/object of inhuman reparations, and then argue that the poetic-political geophilosophies emerging from decolonial Caribbean movements articulated a “new materialism” that instructs on the scope of reparative frameworks for the present. Underscoring the talk will be an examination of geopoetics as an affective source for political world-making, set in the context of colonialisms’ long climate of necropolitical materialisms.

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at the Queen Mary University of London. Kathryn is a transdisciplinary geographer focused on inhuman geographies. She understands the inhuman as a place from which to think about earthly relations and inhumane histories. Theoretically, she engages historical, geophilosophical and black feminist methods to speak to issues of environmental change, empires of geologic practices and the politics of planetary states. 

Specifically, Kathryn is interested in the role of inhuman epistemologies in race, gender, and subjectivity for more equitable environmental world-building.