Black Feminist Geohaptics and the Broken Earth

Abstract

This article examines how literary imaginaries of the haptic in Black speculative fiction attend to the racial politics of the Anthropocene and the centrality of sensory praxis to ecological thought. Reading Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s M Archive and N. K. Jemisin’s Broken Earth trilogy, the article considers how ecological touch—or what Erin Robinsong calls geohaptics—emerges as a central literary trope that imagines new forms of sensory wayfinding and worldmaking that unearth and contest the Anthropocene’s racial ecologies of power. Expanding the concept’s uses and forms, what the article terms Gumbs’s and Jemisin’s Black feminist geohaptics crafts new political forms of sensory dwelling and planetary futures of environmental liberation for Black life. Sense, these works show, makes legible and transforms the Anthropocene’s geographies of power, unearthing how the categories of the human, inhuman, and more than human are generated and mobilized within the matrix of domination. Their works articulate the production of Black women’s geographies within and against the racial, patriarchal, and colonial Anthropocene, orienting sense and touch as central political figurations for anticolonial and abolitionist ecological thought.