The Extractive Zone

Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives

Macarena Gómez-Barris

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780822368977
  9780822368755
• eBook ISBN:
  9780822372561
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface. Below the Surface
• Introduction. Submerged Perspectives
• 1. The Intangibility of the Yasuní
• 2. Andean Phenomenology and New Age Settler Colonialism
• 3. An Archive for the Future: Seeing through Occupation
• 4. A Fish-Eye Episteme: Seeing Below the River’s Colonization
• 5. Decolonial Gestures: Anarcho-Feminist Indigenous Critique
• Conclusion. The View from Below
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index