Geontographies: On Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism

This forum brings together perspectives from geography, philosophy, and political science to reflect on Elizabeth Povinelli’s, 2016 book, Geontologies: A Requiem for Late Liberalism. Contributions come from both junior and senior scholars across a range of interests and backgrounds. Elizabeth Povinelli’s Geontologies is the fourth in her series on Dwelling in Late Liberalism that began in 1994 with Labor’s Lot: The Power, History and Culture of Aboriginal Action. In this latest text, she offers a retheorization of power and governance that challenges Foucauldian biopolitics. In its place, Povinelli maps a mode of power that she calls geontopower: a power that operates over the distinction between Life and Nonlife. Together with accounts of ethnographic encounters in Indigenous Australia, Povinelli’s text weaves together political theory, anthropology, philosophy, and cultural studies. With consequences for human geographers as well as thinkers concerned with the Anthropocene, climate change, and new materialism, Povinelli’s work connects the experience of late liberalism and settler colonialism across space, place, and matter.