The Broken Earth: Racialized Geosciences and Un-Person Magics to Darken Gaia

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Speculative fiction often imagines the Earth as animate or elements of the natural world as having supernatural forms of agency. The idea of planetary animacy in American environmentalism is linked to Gaia theory that poses that Earth is an agential, feeling, and holistic planetary synecdoche. What is missing from the history of Gaia theory, however, is an account of racialization. This essay suggests that the vexed history of Gaia theory helps us think about how N.K. Jeminsin's Broken Earth trilogy (2015-2017) uses magic to estrange our imagination of Earth. It argues that Jemisin uses magic as a motif for planetary animacy but complicates ideas of ecological interconnection associated with seeing the planet as a synecdoche. By darkening Gaia, the trilogy exposes the raced violence of the human as an ontological category in Western thought. Ambiguous magic is a heuristic of planetary animacy, symptom of racialized dehumanization, and metonymic for the apocalyptic in black nihilist thought and indigenous science. This paper argues that Jemisin revises Gaia by enchanting its racialized history to theorize inhuman, intercultural planetary animacy in the Anthropocene.