In Between Gaia and Ground Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes the climatic, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe present as an ancestral catastrophe through which that Indigenous and colonized peoples have been suffering for centuries. In this way, the violence and philosophies the West relies on now threaten the West itself. Engaging with the work of Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari, Césaire, and Arendt, Povinelli highlights four axioms of existence—the entanglement of existence, the unequal distribution of power, the collapse of the event as essential to political thought, and the legacies of racial and colonial histories. She traces these axioms' inspiration in anticolonial struggles against the dispossession and extraction that have ruined the lived conditions for many on the planet. By examining the dynamic and unfolding forms of late liberal violence, Povinelli attends to a vital set of questions about changing environmental conditions, the legacies of violence, and the limits of inherited Western social theory. Between Gaia and Ground also includes a glossary of the keywords and concepts that Povinelli has developed throughout her work.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University and founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective. Her most recent book is The Inheritance, also published by Duke University Press.

Preface  ix
Acknowledgments  xiii
Introduction  1
Section I
1. The Four Axioms of Existence  15
2. Toxic Late Liberalism  36
Section II
3. Atomic Ends: The Whole Earth and the Conquered Earth  63
4. Toxic Ends: The Biosphere and the Colonial Sphere  86
5. Conceptual Ends: Solidarity and Stubbornness  112
Postscript  131
Glossary  134
Notes  143
Bibliography  157
Index  173