Worlds Made Extractive: Black, Decolonial, and Feminist Geographies of Extractivism and Resistance

Over the past two decades, scholars have reconceptualized extraction as ( a ) embedded within racial capitalism's systems of global, uneven accumulation and ( b ) a constitutive organizing principle of contemporary capitalism. Extractivism refers to contested discursive and material practices, governance technologies, and terrains of struggle rooted in racial capitalism which shape how people perceive and relate to the world. Extractive logics describes the ontological and epistemic structures through which extractivism renders differentiated subjects legible, governable, and exploitable. Extractive capitalism fosters dissent, consent, and acquiescence and by foregrounding the micropolitics of extractivism—labor, emotions, embodiment, endurance, care and domestic labor, and life-making practices—social scientists working differently within and across Marxist, Black, feminist, and Indigenous traditions show how people and more-than-human life inhabit and unsettle extractive logics. This review draws from transdisciplinary research in political economy-ecology that reinterprets slow dissent, refusal, and resurgence as world-making practices which reclaim time, land, emotion, and relationality against extractive capitalism.