In The Grit of the Real, Elizabeth A. Povinelli searches for a semiotics that would undermine “geontopower,” the colonial and capitalist division of Life and Nonlife that governs human and more-than-human worlds. Povinelli presses into the public and scholarly intuition that mind, language, and meaning must be liberated from western humanist frameworks if we are to build a sustainable relationship between human and more-than-human worlds. Povinelli asks what the difference is between a semiotics after geontopower and a semiotics against geontopower, between building yet another universal semiotic machine and building a semiotic disruption machine; and she considers how semiotics itself must be disrupted given its historical entwinement in geontological justifications for colonial and capitalist wars, racial social structures, settler governance, and land and resource appropriation. The Grit of The Real engages colonial and Indigenous theory, critical race theory, semiotics and linguistics, philosophy, the history of ideas, and anthropology to examine the basis of our ongoing political ecological disaster and propose a path forward.

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Between Gaia and Ground and The Inheritance, both published by Duke University Press.