"At no point did I actually know what I was doing. It felt at every point of the writing like I was preparing to write a novel, as opposed to actually writing it."
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Lisa Robertson and Audrey Wollen in conversation | Toronto Review
On textile labour, the archive of women's writing, and a lost river in Paris.
![Geology and its figures are surfacing across the humanities: fields including political ecology, Black studies, critical Anthropocene studies, and the energy humanities have recently incorporated or interrogated geologic language and methods. Such breadth of engagement with this branch of earth science evinces a recognition of what Kathryn Yusoff names the “grammars of geology”—the figurative and formal techniques that subtend geology’s reproduction of racial capitalism. Meanwhile, geology also circulates through a popular rhetoric that calls upon textuality to make its objects meaningful: Colin N. Waters, chair of the Anthropocene Working Group, notably appealed to literary technique in his invitation to engage sites of geologic significance by “[reading] the stories that they tell you.”
What is at stake in this figuration of geology as textual? How can literary studies contribute to a critical unearthing of geology’s grammars? And how might an attention to geology in literature reroute what Tiffany Lethabo King calls the “grammar of conquest” that grids modern relation to dispossession and death? This panel invites papers that address geology’s literary and theoretical figurations with particular attention to their imbrication with histories of racialization and conquest. Possible topics may include: the geologic grammars of postcolonial studies and Black studies; the poetics of ground, earth, or extraction; literature and the metabolic rift; literatures of geology and empire; or geology and deconstruction.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ibgrnntulywfrnaj3qnreu6c/bafkreihaukztqdp3am25qwfmm25zwxzew33s7kizmssdymzzpqihc5s6ly)
