Overview

In The Extractive Zone Macarena Gomez-Barris traces the political, aesthetic, and performative practices that emerge in opposition to the ruinous effects of extractive capital. The work of Indigenous activists, intellectuals, and artists in spaces Gomez-Barris labels extractive zones-majority indigenous regions in South America noted for their biodiversity and long history of exploitative natural resource extraction-resist and refuse the terms of racial capital and the continued legacies of colonialism. Extending decolonial theory with race, sexuality, and critical Indigenous studies, Gomez-Barris develops new vocabularies for alternative forms of social and political life. She shows how from Colombia to southern Chile artists like filmmaker Huichaqueo Perez and visual artist Carolina Caycedo formulate decolonial aesthetics. She also examines the decolonizing politics of a Bolivian anarcho-feminist collective and a coalition in eastern Ecuador that protects the region from oil drilling. In so doing, Gomez-Barris reveals the continued presence of colonial logics and locates emergent modes of living beyond the boundaries of destructive extractive capital.

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Extractivism and dispossession have a long history in the formation and transformation of the colonial matrix of power. From the sixteenth through the nineteenth century, extractivism targeted New World Gold, exploiting and enslaving indigenous and African peoples. After the industrial revolution extractivism concentrated on those natural resources needed to feed the machines. And from the second half of the twentieth century to the present, extractivism has fueled the so-called 'fourth industrial (technological) revolution.' Macarena Gomez-Barris provides a well-crafted theoretical and empirical update of this important dimension of coloniality hidden under the promises of modernity. -- Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Option

Extractivism and dispossession have a long history in the formation and transformation of the colonial matrix of power. Macarena Gomez-Barris provides a well-crafted theoretical and empirical update of this important dimension of coloniality hidden under the promises of modernity. -- Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Option Macarena Gomez-Barris makes several major contributions that shed new light on the ways extractivism operates while identifying pathways for seeing, imagining, and living beyond the imperatives of coloniality. Grounded in feminist and decolonial thinking, The Extractive Zone advances a methodology that refuses to separate the fight against extractivism from the struggle against modern colonial and patriarchal relations. -- Nelson Maldonado-Torres, author of Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity

Author Information

Macarena Gómez-Barris is Chair of the Department of Social Science and Cultural Studies at the Pratt Institute, author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile, and coeditor of Toward a Sociology of the Trace.

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