On the 8th of May 2026, Prof. Kathryn Yusoff delivered a lecture titled “Inhuman Reparations” at the University of Amsterdam for the New Tendencies in Critical Theory Series. Sabi Falgás Ortega, a second-year student from the RMA Environmental Humanities, shares their thoughts on the lecture.
How can we land a decolonial subject?
This question got stuck in my mind after Kathryn Yusoff’s recent lecture at the University of Amsterdam. For a talk titled “Inhuman Reparations” her question might not appear as straightforwardly as expected but it is in the concerns and possibilities raised by it that I find it to be summarising of her overall argument.
In her work, Yusoff develops the inhuman as that which has been rendered outside the human and categorized by and through inhumane treatment materially as well as onto-epistemologically. Yusoff pays particular attention to the implication of geology and geophysics in their enactment of a life and non-life divide, or the bios-geos divide in Yusoff’s terms. The bios-geos divide is moreover re-asserted by geo-logics that, through primary dispossession, purify and categorise things regarded as geos and assert their value. These ‘things’, rendered as inhuman, are not only the typical subjects one might think when hearing the word ‘geology’, such as rocks or metals. They are also people, as these geo-logics of dispossession and organization of matter have been and are still key participants in the construction of race. The racializing axis of geology and geophysics, Yusoff argues, positions Black, Brown, and Indigenous people within the category of the geos rendering them as an inhuman geological subject and allowing inhumane treatment.
From here, the question of inhuman reparations does not only work as insistence on the interdependence of social and environmental theory, but it also provokes the breach between material and physical concerns with onto-epistemological projects. Yusoff’s argument for inhuman reparations involves the necessity of addressing this latter breach with urgency in the form of epistemic reparations. These must begin in the separation of bios-geos and navigate in a field of study that is epistemologically grounded in the earth.
If we return to the opening question of landing a decolonial subject, it comes to be a question of bringing decolonial theory to the land and ground as well as bringing the materiality of the earth to the decolonial theory itself. Yusoff’s answer in the lecture took the shape of seeing and engaging with revolutionary struggles as environmental praxis with the theoretical and material work of Amíclar Cabral as one of the examples of how this has been and can be materialized. In thinking revolutionary struggle as environmental praxis we see a fundamental implication of territory and the ground. An implication necessary to go from the situated specificity that all reparations require towards an anti-racist planetary.
How do we address all the levels of harm at play when we reach for reparations? How do we account for the material manifestations of onto-epistemic violence? Does seeing reparations as environmental and earth-bound practices mobilize a decolonial world?
The questions opened up by Yusoff in her lecture, of which these are just a few, are notably pertinent to the environmental humanities. After all, reparations for the inhuman will have to be from, with, and through the ground.
Leave a Reply