The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives

Dissident Acts

by Macarena Gómez-Barris

In The Extractive Zone Macarena Gómez-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 Gómez-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, Gómez-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, Gómez-Barris reveals the continued presence of colonial logics and locates emergent modes of living beyond the boundaries of destructive extractive capital.

Genres: Environment, Academic, History, Ecology, Indigenous, Nonfiction, Feminism

208 pages, Paperback

Published November 3, 2017

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Ivanna Berrios · Rating 3 out of 5]

Radlib

[Kai · Rating 2 out of 5]

I found The Extractive Zone to be an intensely frustrating book. the main thesis is that extractivism is premised on a homogenizing ocular viewpoint which is unable to flatten or exterminate the submerged heterogeneous alternative perspectives imagined and enacted by Indigenous and Afro-American communities and activists. even though i agree with aspects of this thesis and the argument as laid out here, i found many of the author's concepts and analytic moves to be not explained adequately or unpacked with clarity. it is a kind of academic style which surely i fall into frequently - *telling* the reader rather than *showing* them. it makes the argument less convincing - i found myself energized by many of the situations, texts, and art described by Gomez-Barris, but distrustful of or in disagreement with the analysis the author provides.

There are three reasons for my misgivings. First, part of it is certainly due to my own suspicion of both heterogeneity and phenomenology as adequate tools for our contemporary moment (let alone gestures towards ecotourism and anarchism alongside each other???). There are moments and even large swaths of the book that seem to fall into a rather banal vitalism, which i found difficult to distinguish from (for example) either the new materialisms or the new age settler appropriations under critique. A second disjuncture is just a feeling that we really need a very careful unpacking of the stakes and significance of the specificity of a decolonial queer femme method/critique. if the latter urges us to take into account "the complexity [and complexity is a frequent word in this book] of social ecologies and material alternatives proposed and proliferated by artists, activists, movements, submerged theorists, and cultural producers", then to be entirely honest, I was expecting a far more complex analysis! Finally, I just feel like there's a lot of playing fast and loose with concepts. For example, extractive capitalism, racial capitalism, colonial capitalism, neoliberal capitalism, neoliberal colonialism, etc are used rather interchangeably, which, without a marxist core (a la Iyko Day's Alien Capital, for example), results in a loss of precision at times. Are these really isomorphic concepts or interlocking processes, or are they internally complex?

I will say that i still very much am glad i read this book. to put a very fine grained point on it, i absolutely adore the frequency with which Gomez-Barris uses the concept of "perforation" to describe what submerged perspectives do to the extractive zone. and, finally, my misgivings could be tied to the situatedness of my own "perspective" and its historical-ideological construction. still, i could not help but feel a bit disappointed.

[Daniela · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excelente libro

Una manera poco usual de mostrar cómo en los espacios "intangibles" se encuentran los motores de cambio. Y como a través del arte estos espacios se pueden hacer visibles.
Recomendada lectura

[Margaryta · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book might be a bit of a struggle for those who, like me, might have expected something more unified. Each of the chapters works well as a standalone but it felt like "submerged perspectives", which is probably Gomez-Barris' key idea in this text, only came into play around the halfway point before sticking around until the end. On the other hand, what Gomez-Barris does with this book is push against the idea of too much theory and contextualization against case studies. There were moments of more personal reflection and narrative that is not common in such texts, and which make "The Extractive Zone" true to its mandate. I think it's more about personal preference or even simply one's willingness to be more open to this kind of approach. I will be revisiting this one in the future.

[Breanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not the easiest book to follow just because it’s complicated and references so many other theories and critical texts, but The Extractive Zone highlights the continued impacts of the colonial capitalist regime. I specifically enjoyed the chapter on Andean phenomenology as a way of rethinking the relationship between the inner and outer self, the self and the natural world, and undoing the system of classification.

[ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

buen librito. la autora es pasada a caca, no te cuenta una verdad ni un libro academico descolonial gringo, va más allá del reconocimiento sino que expone 3 territorios de americadelsur que presentan y representan otras formas de percibir el mundo y tmb de resistencias que vienen realizándose hace tiempo y q no son muy divulgadas ♡

[Tucker Haddock · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not letting some green-eyed California-raised Ivy League professor tell me how to inhabit “Andean phenomenology” or that I need to embrace Pachamama??? Definitely does what it says it wants to avoid. How is Quechua women working in the global tourism economy a “decolonial gesture” in any way??? The definition of grift.

[Ben Bieser · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is extraction a metaphor? Where does it occur? Where does it register? Super cool to read about Bolivian Indigenous anarcha-feminisms though

[Rachel Hackett · Rating 3 out of 5]

Slightly problematic and exoticizing of Native peoples, but there are some aspects that are interesting/useful. The metaphor of extraction was a useful way of thinking of exploitation.

[Feral Academic · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful - like the emphasis on visualization, found that very effective.

[Alaíde Ventura]

En toda la Duke University no hubo una sola hispanohablante que corrigiera los dos errores de la dedicatoria.

[Mills College Library]

980.04 G6333 2017