London Mining Network’s Resisting Mining Book Club, feat. Macarena Gómez-Barris’ book The Extractive Zone (rescheduled from Sept 22)
About the book:
The Extractive Zone 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 doing so, Gómez-Barris reveals the continued presence of colonial logics and locates emergent modes of living beyond the boundaries of destructive extractive capital.
Macarena Gómez-Barris will give an introductory lecture which will be followed by a Q&A. You do not need to have read the book to attend this meeting. However, if you want to read it, the Introduction is available online https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-extractive-zone and the book is available to buy in the UK. All registered participants in the Book Club will get access to a PDF extract.
About the author:
Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and author. Professor and Chairperson of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, Macarena is the Founding Director of the Global South Center, a research centre that works at the intersection of social ecologies, art/politics, and decolonial methodologies. Her instructional focus is on Latinx and Latin American Studies, memory and the afterlives of violence, decolonial theory, the art of social protest, and queer femme epistemes. Macarena is the author of Where Memory Dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile (2009), co-editor of Towards A Sociology of the Trace (2010), and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Politics in the Americas (2018).