In Between Gaia and Ground Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes the climatic environmental viral
and social catastrophe present as an ancestral catastrophe through which that Indigenous and
colonized peoples have been suffering for centuries. In this way the violence and philosophies
the West relies on now threaten the West itself. Engaging with the work of Glissant Deleuze
and Guattari Césaire and Arendt Povinelli highlights four axioms of existence?the
entanglement of existence the unequal distribution of power the collapse of the event as
essential to political thought and the legacies of racial and colonial histories. She traces
these axioms' inspiration in anticolonial struggles against the dispossession and extraction
that have ruined the lived conditions for many on the planet. By examining the dynamic and
unfolding forms of late liberal violence Povinelli attends to a vital set of questions about
changing environmental conditions the legacies of violence and the limits of inherited
Western social theory. Between Gaia and Ground also includes a glossary of the keywords and
concepts that Povinelli has developed throughout her work.
