Faculty Talk with Prof. Stacey Balkan Today! "Empire and Extractivism"

 

Abstract: In conversation with ongoing debates pertaining to our current geological epoch, this chapter engages arguments for a planetary understanding of [narrative] time in order to distinguish the “colonial-capitalist relation” as the primary determinant in the pivot from a geological history in which homo sapiens is a contingent category toward a species history that renders anthropos as a dominant geobiological force and political agent. More than acknowledge the colonial encounter as an explanatory heuristic for the wholesale destruction of the planetary commons and the birth of a new epoch, I consider the narrative implications of “settler time,” along with the taxonomic production of fossil and racial capital—which is to say the constituent elements of the colonial-capitalist relation— in the worldmaking project of empire; “world” is here understood as a spatial category contoured by industrial conceptions of time. I thus conjoin two dominant strands of thought within postcolonial studies–the century-long tradition of Black Marxist thinking around racial capitalism, and the more recent intervention by energy humanists into something called fossil capitalism–in order to read two contemporary novels that effectively deconstruct the extractivist logic governing the production of both as “energy slaves” in the service of global economic development. Patrick Chamoiseau’s Slave Old Man and Helena María Viramontes’s Under the Feet of Jesus are anti-extractivist works that center critiques of racial and fossil capital, while also antagonizing the forward march of global capitalist production, by employing the fugitive timescales of a kind of “thick time” in the case of Chamoiseau’s surreal narrative portrait of occupied Martinique, and that of the “impasse time” of infrastructural decay in Viramontes’s remarkable portrait of late petrocapitalist Los Angeles–the latter further signifying the material dissolution of the colonial-capitalist relation in the context of LA’s crumbling settler infrastructures. Written for the Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene, this essay seeks to complement ongoing debates around geological time by clarifying that it is not merely the coal-powered factory, but a taxonomic understanding of “energy” and its inputs that is fundamental to the transformation of the biosphere over the long duration of colonial-capitalist modernity, and which also must be understood (as it was in the work of postwar anti-colonial critics like Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire) as constitutive of an uneven global geopolitics whose cultural productions abetted (and continue to abet) the violent expropriation of life in the “developing“ world. In this essay, I shall begin with a brief discussion of extractivism as a form of political economy that harnesses the “colonial geologics” of fossil and racial capitalism. I shall then discuss narrative forms that accommodate the entrenchment of extractivism as culturally hegemonic on a global scale–understanding form in terms of the affordances of particular patterns of narrative (Levine); and I shall ultimately examine the ontological components of extractivism–as a theory of development tethered to modern regimes of resource extraction–along with narrative forms that showcase alternative temporal and political horizons that are neither pre- or post-capitalist so much as demonstrative of a more capacious understanding of being  and time. Such novels might thus be understood as revolutionary forms–not simply conjoining extant narrative traditions, but dismantling and rebuilding them in the service of a post-extractivist political imagination.

image by The Digital Artist; licensed under CC0 / public domain declaration

image credit: brown paper bag by clikr, licensed under CC0 / public domain declaration