The earliest suggested date in the history of material exchange is the 1610 thesis, dating the Anthropocene's start to the European invasion of the Americas, or "New World," and the so-called exchange in flora and fauna. Authors Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin call this the "Collision of the Old and New Worlds." Tying the Anthropocene to conquest makes explicit the colonial relation, but how does this rupture of bodies, flesh, and worlds become buried in the notion of exchange and contact?

In the language of exchange, it might be assumed that something was given rather than just taken. In that slippage of grammar, I want to shake the innocence of a language of description that assails this dehumanizing logic and masks its operations.The "nonevent" of this geologic corporeality is the very contact zone of geosocial relations that the Anthropocene attempts to speak to, yet it continues to do so in the progressive narrative arc, which is also a narrative of the asymmetries of colonial possession (of subjects, land, resources) and Indigenous and Black dispossession. Invasion instigates the disruption of ecological belonging and viable food economies and the introduction of famine and permanent malnutrition. It is the mutilation of land, personhood, spirituality, sexuality, and creativity.

-Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None