Rift Theory Available to Purchase

Chapter 2 discusses a theory of the rift as a spatial form and methodological process for understanding the earth that colonialism broke, and as a foil for the epistemic smoothness of geology in its homogenization of the elemental. The rift is understood as a place and perspective from which to understand the vertigo of geologic relations and to see alternative epistemologies of the earthbound. The rift is a way of reading across broken grounds and specific place-based reparative work, which pays attention to the divergent imaginations of material engagements. Riftwork is presented to think race and geology together, as an embedded set of geographic and geophysical relations made in the fractures of colonial afterlives. Methodologically, the rift is a countergravity to fossilization and stratification (as the empirical bases of geology and the modes of petrifying social forms) and thus is a strategy to desediment white geology.