The Extractive Zone is both the title and site of knowledge of Macarena Gómez-Barris’ seminal work. Here, she stitches together extraction sites premised on the sacrificial dynamics inherent to modern capitalism’s pursuit of ‘progress’ in the age of ‘the Great Acceleration, the Green Transition’, illustrated by the emergence of what she terms the Sacrifice Zone.
Etymologically, the Sacrifice Zone is a relational concept[1]: it names a relation between situated bodies and the mechanisms of ruinous capitalism. Much like environmental historian Jason Moore’s conceptualization of capitalism as a world-ecology[2], the Sacrifice Zone, too, operates as a form of ecological relation embedded within the fabric of capitalist and colonialist systems and ways of organizing human and nonhuman bodies. This resonates with critical geographer Kathryn Yussof’s reading of geology when she notes that no geology is neutral. Rather, geologic principles underpin five centuries of European Empire-building and illuminate the intertwined nature of race and geology[3]. The spatial frontiers intimately connected to the extraction of minerals, resources, and matter, serve as crucibles where ecological bodies – both human and nonhuman – rendered expendable and ‘excess’ are ensnared and sacrificed. Often organized along racial hierarchies, these bodies bear witness to cyclical violence and pervasive atmospheres of toxicity and remain at the center of continued reconfigurations of the world ecology and the annexation of life flows – a worldview that marks the continuation, mutations, and stratifications of colonialism’s logic and landscapes.
Yet, amidst – and in opposition to – the persistent spectre of colonial atmospheric violence and its afterlives[4], The Extractive Zone maps onto the blueprint of what Boaventura de Sousa Santos might call an ‘ecology of knowledge’[5]. This ecology includes, amongst others, ancestral, Indigenous, and embodied memory-based practices that serve as conduits and offer an entrancing channeling of energy through which our bodies seek not only to exceed and escape but ultimately invert and resist the extractivist logic intrinsic to racial capitalism.
Margarida Waco
[1] See Elizabeth Carolyn Miller, Expandability and Expendability – Reading the Sacrifice Zone, 2023. In: Textual Practice, Vol. 37.
[2] See Jason W Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life – Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital, 2015, Verso.
[3] See Kathryn Yussof, A Billion Black Anthropocene or None, 2018, University of Minnesota Press.
[4] See Architectural Design Studio (ADS) 8, Afterlives, 2023, Royal College of Art.
[5] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Epistemologies of the South – Justice Against Epistemicide, 2014, Routledge.
