He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess – that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash. (The Bluest Eye)

In dialogue with Kathryn Yusoff’s enquiry in A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None, my talk asks ‘How is geology an operation of power, as well as a temporal explanation for life on the planet?’ Yusoff explores the transactions between geology and inhumanism within the material registers of colonialism and capitalism, exposing what she terms White Geology and multiple and ongoing extinctions. Looking at The Bluest Eye (1970), Beloved (1987) and Love (2003) by Toni Morrison, I will examine the indivisibility of environmental and racial histories, attempting to identify in these works the ‘new language of geology’ for which Yusoff calls.

The mines, mills, factories and slaughterhouses of Morrison’s fiction provide a significant yet often overlooked perspective on North American societies and economies that consume. These representations enable us to draw out the interrelation between the use of fossil fuels and the exhaustive extraction of other resources in the form of food, labour, knowledge, feeling and Black life. Similarly, Morrison’s depictions and metaphors of sedimentation, erosion and pollution from waste could offer a shifted geologic frame. My focus here forms a part of my wider research project on understandings of time and futurity within African American fiction and visual art of the last thirty-five years.