Geontologies

Anthropologist Elizabeth A. Povinelli, who teaches at Columbia University, returns to her ongoing inquiry into the present state of liberal societies in settler nations. She argues that Michel Foucault's idea of biopolitics falls short as a tool for explaining how power and governance now operate, and she proposes a different framework she calls geontopower. This form of power works by policing the boundary between Life and Nonlife, and it relies on three figures: the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus.

The book looks at geontopower through the efforts of Indigenous Australians who resist the settler state. Povinelli also examines how widely used critical vocabularies, including those around anthropogenic climate change, plasticity, new materialism, and antinormativity, can end up tying their critics more tightly to the very power they oppose.

Povinelli draws on a woman who turned into a river, a serpent-like being that brings fog, plesiosaur fossils, and extensive systems of stone fish weirs. Through these examples she asks how such forms of existence resist being absorbed into Western theoretical language. The result is an account of a type of power that has long been familiar in certain settler late-liberal regimes and is now becoming visible far beyond them.