Lyric Geology: Anthropomorphosis, White Supremacy, and Genres of the Human

This essay argues for lyric as an anthropomorphic pattern of thought which shapes our readings of poetry and Earth. Theorizing what I call "lyric geology," the essay foregrounds two critical conjunctions: (1) the historical co-emergence of the normative lyric subject and the human species as geologic agent; and (2) the anthropomorphic genealogy of literary criticism called "lyricization" as it dovetails with Sylvia Wynter's account of the "over-representation" of colonial man as "the human itself." Reading across a seemingly eclectic archive—Charles Lyell, Robert Knox, Richard Owen, and a maroon known in the Mauritian imperial archive as Simon—I show how the colonial anthropos as self-consciously theorized in and across the nineteenth century materially effectuates on a planetary scale the very racialized anthropomorphosis fallaciously naturalized as lyric. So understood, man's generic "over-representation" and lyric are co-constitutive projects. Together, they proliferate a human fantasy whose flat speciesism at once reproduces and effaces white supremacist violence and colonial dispossession.

This essay theorizes what I call "lyric geology": a colonial-anthropogenic project of interpretatively collapsing planet into poetry and poetry into planet; of reading the normative human not just into poems but also into Earth; of anthropomorphizing the planet such that the wider, deeply material, and potentially devastating consequences for how we read poems come into view. I take my cue from a letter written by a young Charles Lyell to his father on November 11, 1817. Reminiscing upon a recent trip to the Scottish island of Staffa—whose basaltic formations have attracted and inspired geotourists from John Keats to Pink Floyd—Lyell encloses an original poem titled "Lines on Staffa."¹ Envisioning a far-flung moment in Earth's history "ere yet the glowing bards of Eastern tale / Had peopled fairy worlds with beings bright," the poem tells the story of Staffa's formation: "[Nature] found a lone and rocky isle, / And at her voice a thousand pillars tall, / She bade uprising lift the massy pile, / And far within she carved a stately hall"—that "hall" being the extraordinary cavern known as Fingal's Cave. Having "hid each" basalt "column's pedestal / Beneath the depths unseen of Ocean's flood" and "fashioned with an artist's pride . . . many a step along" the cave's "sculptured side . . . as if to tempt . . . Some favoured foot of Mortal yet to come," Nature thereby "framed a fairy scene" on Earth: a material wonder that needs no "shapes of Terror," no "guardian dragon," or other fantastical embellishment. So long as "the glowing bards of Eastern tale" concoct illusory "wizard strain[s]" which "Le[a]d far away deluded Fancy's child," Nature's geologic secrets will remain "guard[ed] from vulgar gaze" and thought by the "Ocean," who "roll[s] his mighty waves around." That is, until the advent of the aforementioned "Mortal yet to come," who might scale Staffa's "sculptured" edifice and so reveal the secrets of its formation.

"Lines on Staffa" asserts a largely tacit but palpable claim: its speaker is representative of the "Mortal yet to come." For, whereas the geologic formations of Staffa give the "deluded Fancy" and "vulgar gaze" of Eastern "glowing bards" the slip, the poem's speaker discerns and delineates the slow flows of rock and sea through which the island and its marvelous cavern took shape. Curious in this context is Lyell's framing of the poem as the start of a new and expansive project: "I will give you the only verses I have found time to make lately, which are but the beginning of a subject."² This phrasing—"but the beginning of a subject"—is multivalent. Taken at its most straightforward, it promises more "verses" upon Staffa, the poem's purported "subject." I say purported because there is also the matter of the speaking subject. Per the lyric's autobiographical frame of reference, this subject could be Lyell himself. In any event, we know the speaker is a distinctly nineteenth-century one, because the poem's enunciative precondition is the uniformitarian geology first theorized in James Hutton's Theory of the Earth (1788) and later in Lyell's magnum opus, Principles of Geology (1830–33). As theorized by Lyell in the Principles, uniformitarian geology deploys "a more perfect knowledge of [Earth's] present condition" as manifest in its processes. Insofar as these processes remain constant over the ebbs and flows of deep time, they demystify "the long series of events which have gradually led to the actual posture of affairs."³ Through careful study, the geologist might therefore uncloak the planet's past and future metamorphoses. So enlightened, Lyell's speaker looks derisively upon a prior world in which "deluded" and "vulgar" human subjects perceived Earth as more metaphysical than material, elusive than explicable, phantasmic than processual. Deploying what Elizabeth Carolyn Miller calls "a European geognostic gaze" to "read the protracted formations of geological time," the poem posits the landscape and its history as "riddles" necessitating newly available forms of expert demystification.⁴ The quiet presentism of "Lines on Staffa"—its speaker's temporally unbound eye, knowing backward glances, and reproachful silences—smacks of a singularly nineteenth-century attunement to the planet and its temporal deeps. In Lyell's poem, lyric and geologic subjects are undifferentiable, the former voicing the latter as only a nineteenth-century speaker could. Working in concert with one another, they formalize an imperial genre of the human defined by its self-conscious planetarity.

Lyell's work as an "aspiring" but ultimately failed poet is neither canonical nor skillful. As Adelene Buckland observes, the "modish" Spenserian stanzas of "Lines on Staffa" grasp at the coattails of Lord Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812–18).⁵ Even so, the poem is notable because in it Lyell's "geological interests found their first, cautious expression."⁶ Taking the conjunction of poetry and science in "Lines on Staffa" as my launchpad, I argue the poem's interpenetrating poetic and geologic subjects tell a climatic story about the so-called lyric and its discontents.⁷ That the normative lyric subject and the human as planetary agent come to consciousness at precisely the same historical moment is no mere coincidence.⁸ For an anthropogenic (and not just anthropomorphic) cosmology of the human is naturalized in and by the expressive fiction of lyric, or what Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins call "lyricization": a genealogy of reading that assigns rather than discovers lyrics.⁹ Consider William Wordsworth's 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, which defines lyric as an anthropogenic project. Describing the poet as a "man speaking to men"¹⁰—an idealized (white, European, bourgeois, male) human specimen who "will apply the principle . . . of selection" to speciate the category of the human into racialized conformity with himself¹¹—Wordsworth theorizes the lyric as a generic Turing test for human expressivity.¹² In Wordsworth's "canonical formulation," lyricization—a restrictively anthropomorphic reading practice—and lyric proper are, as Anthony Reed demonstrates, construed to be one and the same.¹³ I argue that at stake in this conflation is not only the category of the human but also the planet. Hence, the exemplarity of Wordsworth's poet-specimen obtains "in spite of difference of soil and climate": he "binds together . . . the vast empire of human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and over all time."¹⁴ Earth's climatological variability and inhuman longevity is thus subsumed by imperial man, whose mind "is naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature."¹⁵ Elevating those "qualities" which attest man's uniformity with Earth, Wordsworth's colonial poet-specimen forges "nature" in man's mirror-image—he cosmologizes man into and as planet. "Delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions" to his own "as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe," he is "impelled to create" these similitudes "where he does not find them."¹⁶ If "man and nature a[re] essentially adapted to each other," then those adaptations are emphatically anthropogenic.¹⁷ So understood, the normative lyric enunciates the colonial-anthropogenic human subject who self-consciously emerged as planetary agent in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Sketched via Wordsworth, lyricization is not simply an operation of literary criticism. On the contrary, it names an anthropomorphic project wherein human and planet are imaged in and as a speciating poet-specimen who reads himself into the world and invites men to read themselves into accordance with him, to expressively identify with him and by extension the human as exemplified by him. In this context, normative lyric is the colonial projection of a human as the human and, further, the reading of an entire universe into anthropomorphic similitude such that this projection is naturalized as given. Here, I am indebted to Sylvia Wynter's formative account of how "our present genre of the human, Man"—an "ethnic and class-specific descriptive statement of the human"—is "over-represent[ed] . . . as if it were that of the human itself."¹⁸ Wynter's thinking on the naturalization of man over and above all other human genres dovetails in crucial ways with Wordsworth's cosmologizing poet-specimen, as well as Jackson and Prins's critique of lyric as an a priori category which critics assign rather than find. These parallels reveal how critical reading practice is at stake in the white supremacist cosmology of the human which, according to Wynter, subtends "struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources."¹⁹ Read in light of Wynter, Paul de Man's by turns provocative and fraught essay, "Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric," demonstrates precisely this point insofar as it contends, first, that anthropomorphism is not strictly "a trope but an identification on the level of substance"—a "taking of something for something else that can then be assumed to be given," such that it is transformed from undetermined "proposition" into determined "essence"—and, second, that lyric is "not a genre, but . . . the defensive motion of understanding," the interpretive method, the proprietary movement of thought tasked with legislating and securitizing human essence by assigning it where it cannot otherwise be found.²⁰ As such, lyric is a "hermeneutics" whose self-seeking and self-assigning humanism dissolves generic difference.²¹ Lyric in all its culturally-specific variability is thereby subsumed into the lyrical fantasy of man projected upon it. And, per Wynter, so too are a pluriverse of humanisms and worlds.

If Wordsworth's colonial poet-specimen is an instantiation of lyricization, so too is the anthropos as self-consciously theorized in the long nineteenth century by Lyell and others. By turns reading itself into and as Earth, the nineteenth-century anthropos materially effectuates on a geologic scale the very racialized anthropomorphosis fallaciously naturalized as lyric, first by the Romantics and Victorians, and then again in orthodox literary criticism. As Maureen McLane has shown, "the invention of literature"—poetry, in particular—"and the invention of Man roughly coincide," such that "poetry is defined, in fact, as the discourse of the species."²² This essay tracks the reflexive (and thus markedly nineteenth-century) geo-logic through which this discourse and its lyric overrepresentations take shape. To do so, it moves across a heterogeneous constellation of figures including Lyell, the Scottish ethnologist Robert Knox, the English anatomist Richard Owen, and a maroon known in the Mauritian imperial archive as Simon. Together, in all their shades (and sometimes worlds) of difference, these thinkers expose the normative colonial poet-specimen and self-consciously geologic anthropos as concomitant. Equally important, they reveal how the seemingly ideational infrastructures of lyric geology are involved in material processes of dehumanization. Whereas the new lyric studies aims to recover poetic genres illicitly disfigured into agreement under the banner of lyric and so rejects lyricization as strictly bad reading, I purposefully eschew reading verse while at the same time adopting lyricization as practice for two reasons. First, to evince the extra-literary speciesism of lyric as normatively understood. Second, to bring this at once lyric and geologic speciesism into view. Taken up as knowing method and not assumption, lyricization affords a self-conscious practice of reading for the hegemonic genre of the human which has historically been read into poetry. It likewise reveals how nineteenth-century geology not only found the so-called human in Earth—not only theorized the human as planetary agent—but also imprinted into Earth the very human fiction so long mistaken for and naturalized as lyric.

Anthropomorphic Geology

Lyell's Principles theorizes what some now call the Anthropocene as a literal, material, geologic figuration: namely, the anthropomorphizing of an entire planet. Describing the terraforming of "land in relation to the wants of man," the text traces the rapacity of humankind as "consume[r] of a certain quantity of organic matter," the "appropriation" of which is compensated for by "artificially" or rather anthropogenically "improving the natural productiveness of soils, by irrigation, manure, and a judicious intermixture of mineral ingredients conveyed from different localities."²³ Projecting its thresholds for "sustenance" and, thus, its physiology upon the planet, "man" images Earth into anthropomorphic similitude and thereby diminishes biological diversity. A "morass . . . converted into arable land" or "a lake . . . drained and turned into a meadow"²⁴: these anthropomorphic formations make visible a lyric geology; a planet formally as well as materially appropriated to man; an Earth lyricized into a non-literal and yet emphatically human form.²⁵ Whereas the collapse of the human and nonhuman is celebrated by some as the so-called end of nature (and, by extension, the human as purportedly standing over and apart from the non- or inhuman), Lyell's anthropogenic conversions of Earth demonstrate how the supposed radicalism of such a collapse might just as easily slip into reification: namely, the material assimilation of the world into accordance with "man."²⁶ If, per de Man, lyric is an "identification on the level of substance," the Principles invite us to think "lyric" and "Anthropocene" as synonyms of sorts, as differing in degree but not in kind. Lyric is not mere representational abstraction, in other words, but a material substrate of Anthropocenic Earth systems. It quite literally constitutes the ground, the bedrock, the stuff of Lyell's anthropogenic geology and, more broadly, the so-called Anthropocene.

Significantly, this lyricization of Earth selectively (as opposed to universally) affirms the human. The anthropomorphoses traced by Lyell whitewash and manscape the planet into similitude with "man" and its implicit, colonial, capital "M"—with humankind embodied and circumscribed in Wordsworth's poet-specimen and Lyell's necromancer-geologist. This is apparent in Lyell's consideration of the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck's theory of transmutation, which suggested (among other things) that species do not go extinct but rather transform into ever new and increasingly complex life forms as they adapt to their environments over time. Arguing that Lamarck's theory fails to explain the altered ecologies of a terraformed Earth, Lyell writes:

However slowly a lake may be converted into a marsh, or a marsh into a meadow, it is evident that before the lacustrine plants can acquire the power of living in marshes . . . other species, already existing in the region, and fitted for these several stations, will intrude and keep possession of the ground. So if a tract of salt-water becomes fresh by passing through every intermediate degree of brackishness, still the marine molluscs will never be permitted to be gradually metamorphosed into fluviatile species; because long before any such transformation can take place by slow and insensible degrees, other tribes, which delight in brackish or fresh-water, will avail themselves of the change in the fluid, and will, each in their turn, monopolize the space.²⁷

Transmutation, according to Lyell, cannot account for the origin and evolution of species because it neither keeps pace with nor explains the influence of "known causes so much more active in their nature," such that they not only metamorphose other species but sometimes extinguish them altogether.²⁸ Humankind is one such "known" and perhaps uniquely agentic "cause." Whereas Lyell's emphasis upon slow metamorphosis could here be taken to describe the operations of non-anthropogenic climate change, the human conversion of lake into meadow recurs throughout the Principles as a figure—perhaps the figure—of lyric geology. Thus, Lyell argues that "the drainage of lakes and marshes"—an anthropogenic transformation of the planet's "habitable surface" that significantly "modifie[s]" not only "the general climate of a district" but also "the stations of many animals and plants"—marks "a kind of alteration to which it is difficult, if not impossible, to find anything analogous in the agency of inferior beings."²⁹ Here, the anthropos takes the form of Earth anthropomorphized. Lyell locates man's essence not in his physiology, per se, but rather that physiology's geologization into and as planet. Through this anthropomorphosis, man might be mistaken for natural formation. So understood, Lyell's marshes-turned-meadows posit anthropogenic enterprise and lyricization as co-constitutive projects—as an at once intra- and extraliterary formation of the human that naturalizes "man" as its proprietary genre.

The colonial and overtly racist valences of this planetary lyricization come to the fore in Lyell's subsequent turn to "the extirpation of savage tribes of men by the advancing colony of some civilized nation." According to Lyell, by order of nature these "tribes" are "doom[ed]" to annihilation at the hands of those "civilized" white nations whose advancements epitomize "a species which exceeds all others in its aptitude to accommodate its habits to the most extraordinary variations of circumstances"—a species which appropriates to itself organic and inorganic agents that might otherwise bring about "extraordinary" and potentially catastrophic "variations of circumstances."³⁰ Here, the white colonial anthropos emerges in contradistinction to "savage tribes of men" as uniquely representative of the human species on grounds of its planetary (and supposedly privileged) capacity for naturalization and subsumption. Structured by an anthropomorphosis which is at once its own cause and effect, Lyell's anthropos assigns itself to the planet in the form of geologic process so as to discover itself in the planet as uniformitarian law. Kathryn Yusoff posits this anthropomorphosis as a conflation of non-white bodies with rock and ore—with inhuman matter awaiting extraction—that at once restricts the genre of the human along racialized terms and then also reads that genre into and as the world's fundamental structuring principle. Anthropomorphosis—which is to say lyric—is thus concomitant with and works in service of what Yusoff calls "White Geology": a "transmutation" whereby blackness is "consigned to the objecthood of inhuman matter" and whiteness emerges as "the color of universality."³¹ Lyricizing the Principles—attending to their lyric anthropomorphoses—makes visible the geologic ramifications of lyricization's race project; of how lyrical reading practices have tended by and large to aid and abet a race project of planetary scale and consequence.

Even as the Principles lyricize the planet to white colonial ends, it steadfastly denies human exceptionalism. Ian Duncan has shown how human agency turned increasingly "open, multivalent, metamorphic" in the nineteenth century. As "man takes on all forms and functions," becoming "unbound to a special task" or purpose, his singularity thereby seems to slip away.³² Perhaps surprisingly, Lyell makes no attempts to salvage man's presumed exceptionalism—at least, not on grounds of his capacity to stand apart from Earth. For he argues explicitly against this capacity, insisting the white colonial anthropos does not deviate from the uniformitarian order of things. To claim otherwise would be nothing short of "absurd," he argues, for "we have no reason to suppose, that when man first became master of a small part of the globe, a greater change took place in its physical condition than is now experienced when districts, never before inhabited, become successively occupied by new settlers."³³ Even when Lyell seems to argue explicitly for the human as supramaterial locus of agency, he simultaneously asserts man's conformity with Earth. Take, for instance, his suggestion that the anthropogenic "drainage of lakes and marshes" attests to "a kind of alteration to which it is difficult, if not impossible, to find anything analogous in the agency of inferior beings": Lyell goes on to nullify this point by warning that those who assume that "the influence of man is novel and anomalous . . . have forgotten that the human race often succeeds to the discharge of functions previously fulfilled by other species."³⁴ Strangely, Lyell here makes an unexpected and seemingly paradoxical case for the exceptionalism of man as evidenced in his geologic non-anomalousness. In other words, he envisions the colonial anthropos as exceptional based on its purportedly unmatched capacity to seamlessly slip into and masquerade as "other species" and, more broadly, geophysical force—to disguise and invisibilize its enterprise as the unexceptional operations of the planet. Much like Wordsworth's at once idealized and representative "man speaking to men," Lyell's anthropos is atypical in its geologic typicality, exceptional on grounds of its banal universality. According to the Principles, the colonial anthropos is indeed "novel and anomalous," not because it transcends Earth but rather because it metamorphically conceals itself in and as the mere "discharge" of non- and inhuman "functions." Positing the anthropos as singularly undifferentiable from Earth, Lyell lyricizes the planet into anthropomorphic conformity and so collapses the possibility of generic difference. Here, lyric and geology are co-constitutive systems of power.

If geophysical banality is the aspiration of white supremacy, lyricization is the operation through which this anthropomorphic race project is banalized in and across genres, whether of poetry or science, verse or stratigraphic Earth. So concretized as the originary bedrock of all orders and kinds, agency and operation, Lyell's anthropos is naturalized in and as the presupposed ground of all beings, forces, things. The parallels between Lyell's project and that of Scottish ethnologist Robert Knox are particularly illustrative here. Published roughly two decades after the Principles, Knox's The Races of Men (1850) invokes the findings of the new geology to "trace [the origin of the human races] from the present towards the past," with special "interes[t]" in "the Saxon" and, in particular, "a section of the race, the Anglo-Saxon, [which] has for nearly a century been all-powerful on the ocean; the grand tyrants by the sea, the British."³⁵ In so doing, Knox posits "man" as "the perpetual antagonist" of so-called Nature: "against the floral and faunal wilde he carries on perpetual war." Striving to "multiply sheep and oxen, and wheat and cabbages, until the earth be filled therewith," "his destiny is . . . to extrude and destroy, if he can, all that is wonderful and beautiful on the globe as it came from Nature's hands."³⁶ On its face, this is not an argument Lyell's Principles would endorse, for it appears to slip into the narcissistic fallacy of novelty—the self-deluded fantasy of man as standing over and apart from Earth such that it constitutes an anomalous and intolerable break in the uniformitarian order of things. But this cursory reading overlooks the ways in which Knox, very much like Lyell, understands "man" to be "a part of Nature's plan, else he could not be present."³⁷ Observing that "the history of man is included in the history of the organic world" and, further, that they are indivisible—that "you cannot separate" the former from the latter—Knox concludes: "man . . . is of this world; he did not create it, he creates nothing." "Apart no doubt he stands," but only insofar as—and to the same degree that—"all species stand apart from each other." Like all species, "he has his specific laws regulating his form" that "are in perfect accordance with all nature's works."³⁸ If man is an "antagonist" to nature, then, he is so by its decree—and it is precisely this antagonism which, for Knox, affords the measure of the human.

"In dealing with this astounding, yet certain truth," Knox warns his readers: "let us be cautious how we apply the word man," for the human races "differ in this antagonist power immeasurably from each other."³⁹ These differences in degree equate to differences in kind. Thus, "the coloured man" is by this logic no man at all: "his destiny apparently is sealed . . . in presence of a stronger race" and so he "must of necessity give way."⁴⁰ If, per Knox, "the aim of the Saxon man is the extermination of the dark races of men," the white colonial anthropos as epitomized by the "Saxon" is the geologic apogee and privileged vehicle of nature. Thus, man's agency is analogous to those "obstacles to his progress" that he—Earth's privileged destroyer—surmounts: "the forest," "the terrible results of earthquakes and of volcanoes," "the advance of the bog and the heath," among others.⁴¹ Whereas, according to Knox, "the wild man was obviously unequal to th[e] destruction" or systematic "extermination" of species ranging from bison to polar bear, whale to lion, the Saxon is Earth's comparatively "disciplined savage" and, thus, "nature's man."⁴² As such, his operations are undifferentiable from "the climatic changes" which "destroyed the mammoth."⁴³ Here, Knox openly conflates the colonial anthropos with the inhuman, not as resource for extraction but as agent. This is a crucial distinction, for it suggests that the conflation of human and inhuman is by no means monolithic or straightforwardly racialized. Hence, both Lyell and Knox assert the colonial anthropos' privileged human claim on grounds of its interpenetrative relation to Earth. Each defines humankind as a kind of seismic phenomenon whose power lies in its capacity to match and be mistaken for geologic process; whose inhuman humanism is thus read into and reified as planet. In this way, as Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, "to envisage the Anthropocene as the white supremacy scene is simply to articulate its own logic."⁴⁴ Reading Lyell and Knox together reveals how the nineteenth-century emergence of humankind as geologic agent was self-reflexively white supremacist. It also reveals, however paradoxically, the ways in which this imagining of the so-called Saxon as Earthmaster is predicated not, as we might be inclined to assume, on strictly oppositional modes of relation between human and planet, wherein the former adversarially asserts mastery over and against the latter. Rather, what we see in Lyell and Knox is a vision of white supremacist mastery which garners its authority from its continuity with and assertion as Earth—from its positing of human and planet as processually uniformitarian, the former undifferentiable from and thus "succeed[ing] to the discharge" of the latter.⁴⁵

Lyric (as normatively understood) therefore affords a name for the self-concealing operation of white supremacy as geologized by Lyell and Knox. The colonial anthropos—like Wordsworth's poet-specimen—thereby ostensibly becomes the structuring and animating principle of the universe: the uniformity of operation, process, physics that "number[s] worlds beyond the unassisted ken of mortal eye" into contemporaneity; that "penetrat[es] into" and assigns itself as "the dark secrets of the ocean" by way of an anthropomorphosis naturalized as geology; that threads together "the events of indefinite ages before the creation of our race" such that the human as collapsed into man not only inherits but also originates those "events" and, by extension, Earth.⁴⁶ This assignation is then experienced as and mistaken for spontaneous (self-)discovery. Lyricizing the Principles in this way shows how geology is indeed "a racial formation,"⁴⁷ as Yusoff argues, but not one that consistently accommodates essentialist notions of blackness as an inhuman "absorbent" or "buffer"⁴⁸ and whiteness as a contradistinctive, supramaterial, transcendent "right to geography, to take place, to traverse the globe and to extract from."⁴⁹ For this framework hinges upon an inflexible "division of materiality (and its subjects) as inhuman and human."⁵⁰ In this "division" and the rigidity of its counterpositional logic, the white supremacist figuration of man as an insidiously seamless interpenetration of both humanness and inhumanness slips away. But Lyell and Knox's white supremacist lyricizations of Earth hinge upon precisely this interpenetration and its subtleties. If, as they assert, the colonial anthropos is the epitome and limit of the human, it is so because of its sometime uniformity with the inhuman, its agentic indistinguishability from Earth process, its capacity to put on the form of a marsh turned meadow, to veil itself in the guise of slow time, of gradual change, of non-anthropogenic climate change. The colonial anthropos epitomizes the human, in other words, not in opposition to but through the inhuman, through anthropomorphosis disguised as Earth process. This self-concealing anthropomorphosis veils white supremacy in and as the form of the planet, in and as the bedrock of terrestrial law, in and as the a priori ground of a geology whose logic is lyric.

Dark Vanishings

Underpinning and concealing the planetary (and not just literary) operations of normative power—of whiteness reified as Earth system—lyric materially insinuates itself into and as geologic process. Central to this lyric geology in all its white supremacy is the matter of species extinction. If, as Jesse Oak Taylor suggests, "the dawning awareness of a human species in the nineteenth century was also the dawning self-awareness of a species in the midst of becoming a geological agent," extinction—as a process of nature and an anthropogenic operation at once—naturalizes the synecdochical collapse of the colonial anthropos and the human.⁵¹ Like nonhuman types, the human species "had to be abstracted from the individual life as that life was converted physically and violently into a sign." Whereas animal species were "developed from the killing and collecting of thousands of animals"—"from the blood and viscera" of real, material, "animal bodies"—the colonial anthropos is constructed through genocidal violence masked as Earth process.⁵² If such violence is anthropomorphic in the sense that it shapes and polices the genre of the human as figured and appropriated by man, the nineteenth-century emergence of what Patrick Brantlinger calls "extinction discourse" disguised it as geology. As Brantlinger has shown, nineteenth-century natural history theorized for the first time extinction as a process of nature, "operative" not only on "animal and plant species" but also "the human species and its various races."⁵³ Proliferating "the fantasy of auto-genocide or racial suicide," extinction discourse posits "the Noble Savage," for instance, as "self-exterminating"—as "vanishing of its own accord from the world of progress and light." Per Brantlinger, white Europeans are thereby biologized as the apex of the human and eugenicist imperialism naturalized as "divine" or, rather, extrahuman "plan."⁵⁴

In unfolding these claims, Brantlinger circles around—but does not explicitly name—two related but different notions of extinction that came to consciousness in the nineteenth century, one geologic and the other anthropogenic. Attending to their at once palpable and yet undifferentiable co-presence brings to the fore a nuance which otherwise escapes Brantlinger's theorization of the colonial fantasy of "auto-genocide": namely, how figures like Lyell and Knox did indeed conflate genocide with species extinction, but not necessarily to distance themselves from (or absolve themselves of) responsibility for racialized and exceedingly brutal forms of violence. On the contrary, nineteenth-century extinction discourse often conflates genocide with species extinction in service of what I have been calling lyric geology, wherein the colonial anthropos takes the form of Earth process and non-white human beings become the inert matter subordinate to that process. The conflation of genocide and extinction, then, does not simply camouflage the former by attributing its agents and outcomes to the latter as it stands apart from the human. Rather, this conflation does something subtly—but, I think, significantly—different: it casts genocide as geologic process and by extension its perpetrators as planetary agents, thus advancing the anthropomorphic race project of lyric under the guise of Earth. By this logic, to commit genocide is to wield geologic agency and, in so doing, to assert humanness as defined by the capacity to supersede (and thus act in and as) the planet. Whereas the notion of extinction as planetary background noise might seem to put an inherent check on human hubris, I am here interested in how white supremacy coincides with and masks itself as planetary background noise—how the extraordinary racial violence through which the colonial anthropos asserts its exceptionalist human claim is perhaps most conspicuous in its veiling in and as commonplace extinction, in and as geologic operation.

From this vantage, genocide is not an indefensible evil that controverts humanness and so must be outsourced to nature. Rather, it is a sign of the colonial anthropos' geologically ordained humanness as supposedly evidenced in and backed by its uniformitarian alignment with the planet. Knox argues precisely this point when he defines the human as typified by and through the "Saxon man"'s capacity to "destroy" on a geologic scale; to annihilate "the American bison" as "the feebly armed Indian" supposedly could not; to bring about "the extermination of the dark races of men" just as "climatic changes destroyed the mammoth."⁵⁵ Of "the mammoth, the aneplotherium, the dinotherium, the sivatherium," and "the saurians," Knox writes: "Man destroyed them not; yet their race is run." So contextualized, the comparatively recent species extinctions of "the Irish elk, the gigantic fossil ox, the dodo" at the hands of so-called human progress do not mark an anthropogenic and monstrous hijacking of power that threatens to disrupt the continuity of "Man" and Earth.⁵⁶ On the contrary, Knox marshals anthropogenic extinction in support of his claim that civilization and, by extension, the colonial anthropos, operates strictly in accordance with and as Earth. Lyell makes a similar claim when he employs the words "species" and "race" interchangeably, as in his assertion that a "faint image of the certain doom of a species . . . where it has to contend with a more vigorous species" is on view in the "contest . . . between two different races," those being the "savage tribes of men" and "the advancing colony of some civilized nation."⁵⁷ The collapse of "species" into race here and elsewhere in the Principles evinces the scalar confluence and processual uniformity of genocide and species extinction. So understood, colonial genocide affords evidence that European "man" does not deviate from uniformitarian law but, on the contrary, acts as "a part of Nature's plan" (to return to Knox's original phrasing). The colonial anthropos, in other words, lays claim to the human not in spite of but through its capacity for intra- as well as extrahuman violence, for both are construed as instantiations of extinction. If they differ in degree, they do not do so in kind. Cast as species extinction, genocide thus attests the colonial anthropos' privileged because geologic claim upon the human. Rather than acting strictly against or upon the planet, white supremacy consolidates its human authority by aspiring to become planet—by carrying out (but purportedly not deviating from) uniformitarian law.

Arguing that the colonial anthropos does not constitute a perversion of said laws—that the arrival of "a powerful European colony on the shores of Australia" and the subsequent introduction of "a multitude of plants and large animals from the opposite extremity of the earth" is not a disturbance but business as usual in the context of an Earth "system" whose operations are "uniform"⁵⁸—Lyell thereby insists "man" does not interfere with but preserves "the uniformity of the order of nature, both in regard to time past and future." Moreover, by countering the claim that man "differ[s] in kind and energy from any [cause] before in operation," he dispels the ominous question that otherwise follows: "What security have we that they [new causes differing in kind and energy from any before in operation] may not arise hereafter?"⁵⁹ Here, Lyell temporally securitizes a white supremacist monopoly on the human by foreclosing the disruption of normative power reified as geologic process. Insisting upon uniformity not only as the order of nature but also, and perhaps more importantly, the privileged relation of the colonial anthropos to Earth, he reassures his readers there is no future in which whiteness might be supplanted as terrestrial structuring principle. The anthropomorphoses of lyric geology in this way temporalize the planet in accordance with the white supremacy of man. They promise "security" to the racialized human "we" of this anthropomorphic regime, for a system whose past is "uniform in the same sense in which we believe it to be uniform at present" will assuredly remain so in future.⁶⁰ In this way, the Principles aspire to lyricize the white supremacy of the colonial anthropos into a kind of geologic prophecy—a cyclical planetary "nature" whose "essence" (to quote the striking final sentence of Knox's The Races of Men) remains "the same" over slow time, such that it is at once "first and last," "ever young; ever returning; ever reviving . . . eternal."⁶¹ The resemblances between Knox's closing words and those of Hutton's Theory of the Earth—which famously declares "no vestige of a beginning" and "no prospect of an end"—are menacing.⁶²

Species Synecdoche

The lyricization of the colonial anthropos into and as geologic process hinges upon a slippery logic of relation—a seamless interchangeability or, rather, scalability—which makes possible the conflation of related but different processes (such as genocide and non-anthropogenic extinction) and essences (such as the colonial anthropos and Earth). Theorized by Anna Tsing as a "smooth expansion[ism]" which remains "oblivious to the indeterminacies of encounter," scalability marks the fantasy of uninterrupted and seamless "progress" wherein "everything" of value "on earth"—the Earth as a whole included—is considered "exchangeable."⁶³ Claiming "man and nature as essentially adapted to each other," Wordsworth's 1802 preface invokes precisely this fantasy when it suggests "the mind of man [i]s naturally the mirror of the fairest and most interesting qualities of nature."⁶⁴ As briefly discussed in this essay's introduction, the "mind of man"—particularly as embodied by the colonial poet-specimen—thereby becomes the self-concealing model and measure of "nature," restricting it to those "qualities" which are "most interesting" for their anthropomorphic similitude. Insofar as synecdoche "classically poses the interchangeability, and thus coincidence, of the part and the whole," its scalabilities smooth the way for this lyric geology.⁶⁵ For synecdoche is that which facilitates the anthropomorphosis of Earth in the image of the colonial anthropos such that the latter supersedes and stands in for the former. As we have seen in Lyell and Knox, the colonial anthropos is thereby geologized as the human. Here, the operations of anthropomorphosis and synecdoche are inextricable from one another. Synecdoche—in all its scalable, substitutive, relational logic—facilitates the necessarily seamless uniformity of the colonial anthropos with Earth and, by extension, the category of the human. Insofar as it exhibits individual specimens as entire species, the Victorian natural history museum is organized around and exhibits lyric geology in all its anthropomorphic scalability. Richard Owen—comparative anatomist, superintendent of natural history at the British Museum from 1856 to 1884, first director of the Natural History Museum in London, and Lyell's scientific contemporary—says as much in an 1861 lecture delivered at the Royal Institution and published for public consumption soon thereafter.⁶⁶ Petitioning the trustees of the British Museum for the space to actualize the "ideal of a national establishment of natural history," the lecture articulates a tenet Nicolaas Rupke argues is central to Owen's "museum-building agenda": namely, "the quality" of a national museum's natural history collections has "a direct relationship to the level of civilization" achieved by the "national community" in question.⁶⁷ Per Owen's lecture, the ultimate demonstration of a nation's degree of civilization (not-so-coded word for humanness) is "a fully illustrative series of the extinct forms of the different classes" indexed according to "the rock-specimen[s]" with which they are stratigraphically "associate[d]." Such a display would lay bare the geologic "relations of fossil organic remains"—the strata and formations of Earth as elucidated by their "most characteristic fossils."⁶⁸ It would also include "illustrations of the physical or natural history characters of the human kind." These would consist of "casts of the entire body" which, "for the aims of the ethnologist, should be coloured after life."⁶⁹ Arrayed alongside fossils and rocks, "coloured" and purportedly representative "casts" of human beings might thus be marshaled in service of the selectively "humanizing"—which is to say anthropomorphic—race project of lyric geology.⁷⁰ Following Owen's logic, non-white human communities are mere (or, per their exhibitionary alignment with fossils, dead) matter. The white colonial anthropos, on the other hand, is the privileged actor and organizing process through which non-white Others are extracted, anatomized, and curated for public consumption. So revealed in the emphatically nationalist, imperialist, racist space of the likes of the British Museum, Owen's display would assert the colonial anthropos as singularly continuous with and narratively attuned to geologic process—as the self-finding and -revealing structuring principle of Earth. What's on at the Victorian natural history museum, then, is not simply species (and interspecies relations) as they have evolved in deep time, but also the anthropomorphic uniformity of Earth and man—the invisibilization of lyric as geology, of anthropomorphosis as Earth process.

Extinct species vanquished at the hands of colonial Europeans play a central role in the crafting of this lyric geology and its proprietary humanness. For against the backdrop of a growing awareness of extinction as at once geologic and anthropogenic, extinct species uniquely epitomize the ascendance of the colonial anthropos to geologic power and, by extension, the lyricization of Earth. Hence, Owen's urging of the trustees toward the "acquisition" of a "properly stuffed" bowhead whale specimen before "its utter extinction at no very remote period":

Modern inventions such as the screw propeller, improved adjustment of fire-arms to harpoons, explosive shells, and other effective methods of capture and slaughter, have rapidly thinned the numbers of this huge, but timid, and almost harmless animal. Latitudes in which, a century ago, the whale-ships reckoned upon, and usually made, full cargoes, are now traversed by them as being wholly barren of sport, on their way to the extreme northern inlets, at once the discovery and chief practical remunerative results of our late arctic voyages. . . .The Natural History Museum of that nation which has invested most capital, and received the largest returns for it in the slaughter of the Balæna Mysticetus, might be expected to be that in which, when the animal itself had utterly passed away, there might remain as a subject of wonder, contemplation and study, the sole and unique taxidermal evidence of this marvel of creation.⁷¹

At first glance, Owen's desire for a bowhead specimen seems strictly strategic: acquiring a large whale would necessitate a desirable museum expansion. Hence Owen's exaggeration of the bowhead's size, which Oswald Walters Brierly critiques in his published response to Owen's lecture. Citing observations made during an 1850 voyage on the HMS Maeander, Brierly notes there are numerous whales "of a much larger kind than the Greenland Mysticetus," which rarely if ever "exceed[s] 60 feet" and "certainly never attains the length of 90 feet, implied in Prof. Owen's paper."⁷² Contra Owen, Brierly observes there are other, and definitively larger, species of whales known to exist that do not require similar misrepresentation. This begs the question: if what Owen wanted was additional space for the British Museum's natural history collections, why would he turn to the bowhead, intentionally and unnecessarily exaggerating its length when he—an expert anatomist—likely knew better?

The holes in Owen's scalar argument point toward ulterior motives informed by the bowhead's special significance in the context of nineteenth-century economies of colonial-capitalist extraction, whose violent infrastructure is well apparent in Owen's laudatory catalog of "effective methods of capture and slaughter." Known to whalers like William Scoresby simply as "The Whale" because of its importance, the bowhead and its byproducts were crucial to imperial nations' commerce, arts, and manufacture.⁷³ Moreover, the bowhead was integral to "the domestic economy of savage nations," the ongoing devastation of which is manifest in Owen's prediction of the whale's coming extinction.⁷⁴ Owen seems to have grasped, in other words, that the fast-disappearing bowhead was an icon-in-the-making for a restrictively anthropomorphic Earth—for a planet whose flora and fauna, surfaces and depths, are engineered into conformity with the colonial anthropos. Such a specimen would be "a subject of wonder" insofar as it synecdochically collapses anthro-imperial violence ("the screw propeller, improved adjustment of fire-arms to harpoons, explosive shells") and extinction as Earth process, concealing the former in and as the latter. If this "sole and unique taxidermal evidence" stands testament to the "marvel of creation," the creative power on view in such a display is not strictly God's (as Owen superficially claims) but lyric writ large: the colonial anthropos's purportedly seamless insinuation of itself into geologic process whereby to "contemplat[e]" a bowhead whale specimen is in actuality to "wonder" at the geologization of white supremacy. As I see it, Owen exaggerates the bowhead's size in order to make a pragmatic case for an acquisition whose true grandeur is figurative, not scalar.

Owen's real objective in arguing for the British Museum's expansion, then, is to convince trustees and public alike that archiving natural history and the colonial anthropos are one and the same project. Specimens of extinct species are especially significant to this project because the juxtaposition of, say, ichthyosaurs and mastodons with animals exterminated by anthropogenic colonial-capitalist means would fuse man into Earth such that their collapse might be apprehended in a single glance. For this reason, Owen warns his readers:

If the wealthiest maritime and commercial country should not think it worth while to preserve one specimen of the Right Whale before the species becomes mere matter of history, it will be amenable to the same reflection which is cast upon the Dutch, who, intent only on killing the Dodo . . . finally extirpated the species without caring to preserve a single specimen in their Museums for the behoof of Natural Science.⁷⁵

Here, Owen scoffs at the Dutch for their remarkable failure to foresee the dodo's fate and secure for themselves even "a single specimen," the preservation and display of which would make "any capital in Europe" a—if not the—destination to "be eagerly visited by the Naturalist."⁷⁶ He goes on to observe that, as a result of this carelessness, "the sole examples of the skin of this strange bird" exist in English museums located in Oxford and London.⁷⁷ Arguing via bowhead and dodo that Earth history at once indexes and is indexed by the colonial anthropos, Owen understands British claims upon the human as bound up with the preservation of those species whose deaths iconize the uniformity of "man" (Anglo-Saxon man, in particular) and Earth. To indiscriminately kill a species without archiving it is to abdicate those claims—to relinquish synecdoche and the fantasy of anthropomorphic scalability upon which such claims are predicated. Whereas species extinction is so often construed as a loss, Owen posits the bowhead's extinction as a gain—a crucial opportunity for man's self-making and -indexing—but only if the species in question and the anthropogenic means of its accomplishment are judiciously anticipated and monumentalized.

Dodo Disfiguration

The dodo would seem an ideal synecdoche for the anthropomorphic violence of lyric geology. It is now ahistorically "assumed that those who were responsible for [the dodo's] extinction were aware of what they had done" and that they acted "deliberately"—"those" in question being the Dutch, who during their seventeenth-century tenure on Mauritius indiscriminately destroyed the bird (and its forest habitat) in collusion with pigs, rats, cats, and other non-native species. But the dodo did not, in fact, acquire its notoriety as the "greatest icon of extinction" until the mid-nineteenth century.⁷⁸ During the Napoleonic Wars, the British wrested control of Mauritius from the French, who themselves had taken possession of the island following its abandonment by the Dutch in the early eighteenth century. Over the decades that followed, scientific thinkers established species extinction as both a naturally occurring process and an anthropogenic phenomenon. In this context, the colonial anthropos as geologic agent came to consciousness, and the dodo—whose extinction was one of the first definitively attributable to human enterprise—garnered increasing interest. Fascinated by the bird's strange physique and lurid death, Victorians voraciously consumed texts on the subject ranging from H.E. Strickland and A.G. Melville's The Dodo and Its Kindred (1848) to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865). Owen himself wrote perhaps the most influential of these books: Memoir on the Dodo (1866). Echoing Knox's account of white supremacist man as privileged destroyer and thus enactor of Earth, Owen's Memoir represents the arrival of the Dutch in Mauritius as "the introduction of . . . a destroyer" tasked with annihilating a "degenerat[e]" life form whose death was geologically overdue.⁷⁹ The dodo "bec[a]me extinct," in the words of the American ornithologist Samuel Cabot, "because its time was run."⁸⁰ By killing the bird, European man enforced the rightful boundary between the present epoch and those of the past. The passivity of Cabot's language, here, does not so much obfuscate as rather geologize man's agency. In the case of the dodo, the colonial anthropos wields stratigraphy as a pre-ordained death sentence of sorts—a license for bringing the planet into conformity with itself, for determining who and what is (dis)continuous with Earth's purportedly anthropomorphic and emphatically white epochal present.

The dodo would seem to serve Owen's nationalist purposes as well as, if not better than, the bowhead, for at the time of his petition for museum expansion, the British not only controlled Mauritius but also possessed the most remarkable of dodo remains: exceedingly rare soft-tissue specimens of the bird's head and foot on display in Oxford, plus another foot at the British Museum.⁸¹ Why, then, did Owen organize his petition around the bowhead and not the dodo, the latter being in his own words perhaps the single most desirable specimen for museum display? Size matters, of course, as does the wish to draw crowds and compete with other European national museums. Even so, a less obvious and more provocative answer lies in the formal specificity of the dodo's "imperfect memorials":⁸² namely, their existence only in and as parts. Whereas the formal integrity of Owen's prospective bowhead might facilitate an equally unitary imagining of the anthropomorphic planet it stands in for, the dodo's remains are irrevocably particulate, foreclosing full organic restoration and scalable perfection. This is strikingly evident in Lyell's extended eulogy for the dodo, wherein he mourns not so much the bird's extinction as its unavailability to and for preservation. Hence, he dates the bird's true death not to its seventeenth-century extirpation from life but to January 8, 1755: the "exact day and year when the remains of the last [complete] specimen of the dodo"—having gone to rot and thus being no longer fit for display—were "cast away" by order of the Ashmolean Museum's trustees. All that would survive were "a foot and a head, in an imperfect state."⁸³ On the scales of both human and planet, the dodo's extinction was an extremely recent event in the nineteenth century. This made its near-total destruction as a museum specimen (and not just a life form) particularly absurd. Thus, Victorian naturalists assert that the dodo's double effacement turns the disciplinary and stratigraphic order of things topsy-turvy: "the paleontologist has . . . far better data for determining the zoological characters of a species which perished myriads of years ago, than those presented by a group of birds, several species of which were living in the reign of Charles the First."⁸⁴ If Owen advocates for the pre-emptory preservation of the bowhead, whose museum display would manifest the colonial anthropos's epistemic (self-)mastery of and uniformity with Earth, Lyell's lament for the dodo's death at the museum—the near-total destruction of the last, organically complete, soft-tissue dodo specimen—unsettles man's lyric-geologic regime.

So described and elegized, the dodo (or, rather, its remains) obstructs what Monique Allewaert describes as the "classica[l]" precondition of synecdoche: a thinking of wholes as "ontologically discrete entities," as "self-sufficient bodies" that at once precede and succeed parts, that posit "aggregates" as nested and scalable organic unities.⁸⁵ Interestingly, the dodo's extreme partiality in death—its particulate disruption of scalability, of nested and perfectly mirrored entities adding up to an organic, harmonic, seamless whole—extends and exaggerates written accounts of the living dodo wherein the bird skews the normatively synecdochical relation between parts and wholes. Consider, for instance, the words frequently marshaled to describe the dodo as a life form: "unwieldy," "grotesque," "stupid," "deform[ed]," "inactiv[e]," "unresisting," "disgusting," "silly."⁸⁶ For nineteenth-century thinkers, these qualities name a problem of proportion, of improper and distortive relation between part and whole wherein individual parts dangerously overwhelm, exceed, and deform the totality to which they should be subservient. Being of "grotesque proportions," the dodo was grotesque because disproportionate, because comprised of parts that resist organic coordination with and subordination to a discrete whole which at once precedes and succeeds the particulate, which posits the particulate as its synecdochical subsidiary.⁸⁷ Disturbed by the dodo's distortion of organic holism and the normative—which is to say scalable—operation of synecdoche, some nineteenth-century thinkers speculated the bird's material remains were a fantastical (and doctored) remix of species: "the Cassowary of the East Indies, to which has been added the bill of an Albatross," perhaps, or "the body of an ostrich" embellished with "the bill and legs of other birds."⁸⁸ Grossly disproportionate in life and horrifically particulate in death, the dodo's synecdochical figuration of an anthropomorphic Earth mirrors the colonial anthropos back to itself as alarmingly discontinuous and impotent. Inasmuch as the dodo's remains foreground synecdoche's capacity to deviate from the logic of pure interchangeability, they interrupt the lyric geology of man.

As the dodo unsettles white supremacist lyricizations of Earth, it throws into partial relief a very different, inassimilable, anticolonial geology and, potentially, an attendant non-lyric humanism. This geology becomes tangible in colonial naturalists' speculations that maroon refuges on Mauritius might harbor exceedingly rare and highly desirable dodo remains. Believing dodos likely nourished maroons in the seventeenth century, Strickland and Melville's The Dodo and Its Kindred recommends naturalists "make a series of excavations in the alluvial deposits, in the beds of streams, and amid the ruins of old habitations in Mauritius," which would likely contain "remains of the Dodo." Particularly promising, they conjecture, are "the caves with which those volcanic islands abound." Speculating that "the chief agents in the destruction of the brevipennate birds were probably the run-away negros, who for many years infested the primæval forests of those islands and inhabited the caverns," Strickland and Melville suggest "the osseous remains of those remarkable animals" are almost certainly to exist in those places where maroons "would doubtless [have left] the scattered bones of the animals on which they fed."⁸⁹ Victorian scientific thinkers thereby linked the dodo directly to the sustenance of communities that thwarted imperial enslavement. This history has since been confirmed by recent excavations in karst caves on the southern coastline of the island, which are thought to have served as maroon "way stations."⁹⁰ There, contemporary archaeologists unearthed dodo bones "in stratigraphic context with distinct metallic cut-marks" thought to have been made by self-emancipated Africans. Dating to "the Dutch period of occupation," this "archaeological assemblage" constitutes "the first material evidence of dodo consumed by man."⁹¹ The material specificity of these bones evinces a different and more complex story about human and dodo than that which is most familiar. To be clear, I am not reallocating culpability for the dodo's extinction to maroons. That responsibility lies with the Dutch, the nonhuman kin they brought with them to Mauritius, and the slave trade. Rather, my point is to interrogate the erasures that totalizing narratives of colonial power and responsibility can inadvertently reproduce.

The sheer possibility that dodo bones bear traces of maroon life on Mauritius interrogates—however provisionally or indeterminately-established accounts of the dodo's iconization of extinction and the so-called Anthropocene, wherein the "fresh flesh-bereaved" and "improvident[ly] rapaci[ous]" Dutch loom large.⁹² Opening onto a more speculative and anticolonial history, these bones invite us to inhabit what Lisa Lowe calls "the past conditional temporality of the 'what could have been'."⁹³ Whereas (despite persuasive evidence to the contrary) some quibble that the cut marks in question could have been made "by shipwrecked mariners" and not maroons,⁹⁴ Amitava Chowdhury—an historical archaeologist of colonial Mauritius—observes that such claims inevitably confront an irresolvable "methodological problem."⁹⁵ This problem inheres in "the cultivated silence, exclusions, relations of violence and domination" that, as Saidiya Hartman has shown, "engender the official accounts" of history.⁹⁶ In this context, I am interested in how the material remains of dodos who potentially nourished Africans on Mauritius might constitute "fragments upon which other narratives can be spun."⁹⁷ For, in all their metallic striation, these bones assert a human plenum forged by maroons living and building otherwise. This plenum constitutes what Yusoff calls "an insurgent geology of belonging": a "state of possibility" whose "transformative intrarelations with other forms of life and nonlife unsettles and redirects the confinements of humanist prescriptions of what and how life is constituted."⁹⁸ These "intrarelations" belie the lyricizations of the colonial anthropos. Whereas the bowhead iconizes colonial-anthropogenic technologies of extinction and the genocidal anthropomorphosis of Earth, striated dodo remains are by contrast maroon technologies of sustenance, survival, and worldbuilding. Asserting a geology of anticolonial insurgence, the dodo bones in question thereby cannot be comfortably assimilated into the white supremacist fantasy of a planet lyricized into present and future uniformity with man.

This anticolonial geology returns us to the juncture on view in Lyell's "Lines on Staffa," with which this essay began: namely, the unsettled terrain of the vocative—of (reading for and adjudicating) human expressivity—as inflected with colonial-anthropogenic power in the normative lyric tradition. Particularly illuminating in this context is the testimony (and historiographic treatment) of a man who may have been the last to see living dodos: a maroon known in the colonial archive as Simon. According to the official account, Simon escaped slavery during a 1662 mission to rescue survivors of the Arnhem, a Dutch East Indiaman shipwrecked off the Mauritian coast. This mission was headed up by Hubert Hugo-Dutch privateer, future governor of Mauritius, and enslaver—from whose ship Simon was said to have fled with four others. Upon Simon's recapture in 1674, Hugo (by then governor of Mauritius) questioned him, recording the supposed contents of their conversation in his journal. The two men reportedly discussed dodos (among other things), with Simon telling Hugo he had seen the bird twice during his eleven or so years in the Mauritian interior.⁹⁹ Unsurprisingly, Hugo's account is exceedingly fraught. What record remains consists of an early twentieth-century paraphrase of a nineteenth-century transcription of Hugo's original journal, plus a recent French translation of the transcription.¹⁰⁰ Rightfully, historians of the dodo say we cannot know for sure whether Simon and Hugo possessed a shared ornithological vocabulary; or whether, unbeknownst to them, they were using the same word to discuss not one but two different species of birds; or whether the official account seamlessly substitutes Hugo's words for Simon's; or whether Simon may simply have said what he imagined Hugo, his captor and interrogator, desired to hear.

But on the basis of these irresolvable difficulties—the hypermediation of voice, the treacherous ground on which Simon tread, the methodological challenges endemic in the colonial archive—Simon's witness is all too conveniently and quite troublingly sidelined as self-evidently (if not also sympathetically) "fudged."¹⁰¹ Viewed through the lens of positivist historiography, Simon is uncritically portrayed as marginal, fleeting, subordinate. Subtending these dehumanizing representations are anthropomorphic methods of reading we might fruitfully open up via the normative lyric tradition theorized à la Wordsworth: namely, who is perceived and received as "a man speaking to men"; who deemed to possess "a greater knowledge of human nature" and the Earth that is purportedly forged in man's mirror image; who empowered to "create" or cosmologize and not just find; and who held to account in and by these vocative exercises of power and their critical reception.¹⁰² Treating the dodo as "a test of reliability"—even though, as put by Megan Vaughan, "there is nothing stable about this native, against which all else is judged"—historians attempting to establish the bird's extinction date have by and large discounted Simon's voice and, by extension, his humanness.¹⁰³ Consider the racialized taxonomy which emerges via the conclusions drawn about the expansiveness of Hugo's epistemological mastery and expressive capacity versus Simon's assumed intellectual and vocative incapacity: Hugo is fully enfleshed and "educated," Simon "a recaptured slave on the run";¹⁰⁴ Simon is said to "have been pressured into giving responses to questions he may not have understood or known the answers to," whereas Hugo's understanding and knowledge are not similarly up for grabs;¹⁰⁵ and where Hugo is said to authoritatively "lead" and "influence," Simon is by turns represented as a puppet or a liar. These troubling characterizations are then leveraged as definitive proof that whereas "Simon's observational claims are thus clearly open to question . . . Hugo's bald statement that no one living on the island had ever seen a Dodo is not."¹⁰⁶ More often than not, Hugo is given the benefit of the doubt, his account (in all its hypermediation) subject to scrutiny only when convenient.

Thus, what Hartman calls the "silence" of the colonial archive—and the duress under which Simon spoke—are wielded as cudgels for the selective attribution and foreclosure of voice. As put by Lowe, this kind of "historical reconstruction" fails to "expose the constructedness of the past, and release the present from the dictates of that former construction"—those dictates being "liberal modernity" and its "dominant histories."¹⁰⁷ Equally revealing in this context are the racialized conclusions drawn about the knowledge and figures of speech reserved by some contemporary readers for European mastery alone—knowledge and figures of speech enslaved Africans supposedly could not have possessed. Zeroing in on a comparison drawn between dodo and cassowary (another kind of flightless bird) in Hugo's account, some historians treat this analogy as an inherent red flag: "Simon was an African and hardly likely aware of Cassowaries (an Australasian genus), let alone their relative size to dodos."¹⁰⁸ Purportedly out of reach to a man whose history and intellect we know nothing about beyond what very little is asserted in the official record, this analogy is thereby proffered as almost certain evidence for Hugo having put his own words into Simon's mouth—for the presence of prosopopoeia, the conferral of voice to entities otherwise considered (or read) as faceless, inanimate, dead. These claims are then marshaled in support of a dodo extinction date whose corroboration poses no such challenges to the colonial archive or to normative methods of finding, assigning, and foreclosing voice. This even though Simon most certainly possessed an incisive knowledge of Mauritian flora and fauna, having lived continuously on the island for over a decade—knowledge that most certainly differed from and likely exceeded Hugo's formal education and experience.

At stake in the ostensibly historicist policing of Simon's speech is what Barbara Johnson understands to be a deeply lyric question: namely, that of vocative power—of who does or does not possess and throw voice, of who does or does not wield the "institutional backing" or authority to "magnetiz[e] a world around his call."¹⁰⁹ If, for lyric theorists like de Man, voice is inherently anthropomorphic, "assum[ing] mouth, eye, and finally face," its selective attributions and foreclosures legislate the human.¹¹⁰ On these grounds, Simon's various inquisitors (colonial and critical) appropriate the power of the (last) word. Insofar as lyricization, per Kamran Javadizadeh, names the elevation and (self-)effacement of "a transcendent lyric subject" whose universality is assumed, idealized, and "reifie[d]" in and as method, Simon's vocative disenfranchisement makes visible the planetary ramifications of the anthropomorphic reading project that is lyric—the racist fantasies of that project as naturalized in and as Earth.¹¹¹ Here, what Hartman calls the archive's "cultivated silence"—with silence entailing not only erasure but also ventriloquization (or, rather, the dispossession of voice as evidenced by its presence)—comes into play. If "Hugo is at pains to make himself look merciful," some scholars have failed to consider whether this performance of mercy was perhaps not for "his captive" but, on the contrary, for his readers.¹¹² Exploring this possibility—and the indeterminate blend of fact, fiction, and fantasy that is Hugo's story—Vaughan reads Simon in the context of colonial romance and racist caricature. Cast as a "good," repentant, "domesticated maroon" who "promise[s] not to escape," and "to be loyal and hardworking," so long as his master "release[s] him from his chains," Simon—at least as ventriloquized by Hugo—may well be a figment of the colonial imagination conjured to transform the very real threat of marronage into "bedtime" entertainment for Dutch colonials on Mauritius.¹¹³ So understood, Hugo's account smacks of a "shaky regime" in which "apprehended slaves' confess[ions]" lent false credence to forms of colonial mastery that were in reality "continually contested by communities of individuals like Simon," necessitating not just physical but also psychic and (I would add) lyric repression.¹¹⁴ For it is precisely through such vocative minstrel performances that man's Others are transformed into masks for racialized games of lyric dressup, the conceit of which is white supremacist claims to the human in all its purportedly mouthly power.

In this way, Simon forces a confrontation with a genre of colonial-lyric fantasy wherein man's Others are made to speak by and through a white supremacist model of the human geologized as the human. It is from within this tradition that Lyell speaks in "Lines on Staffa." Repudiating as antediluvian "the glowing bards of Eastern tale" whose "wizard strain / Led far away deluded Fancy's child" and cultivated "vulgar gaze," the poem spurns obsolescent, "deluded," and (per the Orientalist reference to "Eastern tale") emphatically non-white worlds purportedly past. Like dodos, "Eastern" poets are here cast as stratigraphically anachronistic. Antiquated in mind and backward in time, they are a foil for what Saree Makdisi calls "the manly, honest, virtuous Occidental self," their "effeminate, luxurious, lazy, indulgent" minds and works attesting to man's geologic impersonality and privileged humanness. If, as Makdisi argues, Wordsworth's project in Lyrical Ballads is "to rescue poetry from being merely a matter of those by then notoriously Oriental traits of 'amusement and idle pleasure,' 'idleness and unmanly despair'"—to forge "an explicitly 'manly' style, one available to the 'sound and vigorous mind' of the Occidental self"—Lyell's "Lines on Staffa" foregrounds this project's geologic underpinnings and anthropogenic thrust.¹¹⁵ Here, the total elision of the lyric "I" in "Lines on Staffa" is critical. For, sans pronominal specification, Lyell's speaker asserts a whiteness by and through nature's voice that requires no identification or denotation—which masquerades as self-evidently and geologically the human insofar as it would seem vocatively synonymous with Earth. So contextualized, lyric (as normatively understood) names a self-concealing anthropomorphosis whose operations—in all their lyricizing and anthropogenic white supremacy—are at once poetic and geologic. Insofar as Anthropocene discourse, like normative lyric, proliferates a human fantasy whose flat speciesism at once reproduces and effaces colonial violence and dispossession, it reveals the pressing ecopolitical (and not strictly literary) stakes of lyricization. Bound up with the reading of poems (and speaking subjects) historically used and abused under the banner of lyric geology is a pluriverse of humanisms teeming with collective flourishings and latent futures, as well as a non-anthropomorphic—which is to say more just and habitable—planet.