Transpositional Geologies: Spectres of Coloniality

An exquisitely designed volume that invites the reader to engage with a progressively nuanced reading of institutional mineralogical collections and geology’s history. If you enter an institutional mineralogical collection, you typically encounter glass cabinets organised by classification systems according to material properties. Yet, each mineral carries with it a history of extraction, destruction, (dis)possession, and global relations. Transpositional Geologies localises such collections as indices of the afterlife of colonialism and proposes an evolving political geology, reading mineral specimens as objects of “culture” rather than of “nature.” Capturing his five-year artistic engagement and cultural collaboration in Namibia and Germany, Sascha Mikloweit brings together international voices from fields including anthropology, critical theory, geology, history, museum studies, philosophy, poetry, public administration—and the perspectives of boltwoodite, cerussite, or smithsonite. Rock by rock, this exquisitely designed volume invites us to engage with a progressively nuanced reading of geology’s history: its epistemic violence, omissions, and racial regimes, and how the lasting residues of its colonial legacies continue to shape our present-day extractive realities.