Broad theories of “extractivism” oversimplify and inhibit material action against extraction.

First might be the question of travelling theory: how well do the geographical, politico-economic, and material-ecological relations named by extractivism translate beyond a Latin American context, or across time from the early phase of colonial conquest in the sixteenth century to the twenty-first-century present? This question is raised explicitly by Terian, and tacitly by other authors’ attention in this special issue to sites in Romania, Ukraine, Saudi Arabia, Mozambique, Ghana, the U.S. Gulf Coast, and New Mexico; it lies, too, at heart of Parks’s instructive assessment of ‘resource poetics’ in Appalachia. Indeed, the itinerary of our own argument, ranging across worlds and continents, assumes a considerable conceptual reach and mobility for extractivism. Still, perhaps it is better to write of extractivisms, in order to attend carefully to the dynamic and diverse particularities of relation across space and time.

Second might be the risk of conceptual creep and adjectival ubiquity. Just as Anthropocene seems to be increasingly – and often rather loosely – invoked as a new synonym for modernity, there is a danger that extractivist may become the adjective and epithet du jour. Along with longstanding invocations of neoliberal globalisation, ‘settler colonialism and extractive capitalism’ (to cite one recent expansionist account of extractivism) have now been added to an excoriating litany of exploitative badness – that is, the villainous forces shaping the past and present and deranging the future.Footnote13 Our concern about this litany derives not from any doubt about the malevolence of these forces; rather, we wonder about the vitiating effects of a lack of terminological precision in adjectives whose modifying, specifying force threatens to dissolve into synonymic restatement. In too much discourse today, all colonialisms are settler colonialism, and all capitalism is extractive, just as a notional neoliberalism has long been the very air we breathe. Instead, what if we hold on to extraction as a specific moment in, or aspect of, particular versions of economic production, with implications for labour, value, and profit? This approach would insist upon understanding extraction (or extractivism) not as a synonym for capitalism but as one potential aspect of it, which stands in dynamic relation to other parts (and which also, as is sometimes forgotten, played an important role in other economic modes, not least the political ideology and technological developmentalism of the former Soviet Union). With regard to the particular role of extraction within capitalism: Is the metabolic rift between country and city identified by Marx (and traced through cultural imaginaries by Raymond Williams) properly described as extractive?Footnote14 How are neoliberalism’s promises premised on extraction? Are all instances of privatisation or asset-stripping to be understood as ‘extractivist’, rather than only those which involve things like land enclosures or mining concessions? What, we ask, is extractive (or extractivist) about extractive capitalism, if, as Imre Szeman has observed, extraction is on its way to becoming simply ‘the name for any process through which value is generated for capitalism’?Footnote15

The answer, we think, must have something to do with materiality. Extractivism demands critical attention to the stuff of nature upon which capitalism (or socialism, for that matter) does its work of accumulating surplus value. The itineraries of material flows charted in extractivism’s Latin American genealogy indicate several kinds of rift – geographic, social, metabolic/ecological – that create disjunctures in the value extracted from, produced by, and returned to sites of extraction and the lifeworlds in which they are embedded. And if materiality matters in these ways, then the use of extractivism as a conceptual umbrella term may be inadequate, in at least two ways: first, inadequate to describe the variety of social relations constellated around different kinds of resources – not only fossil fuels, but also, say, ores, rubber, bauxite, tin, lithium, sugar, cacao, diamonds, gold, lumber, etc.; and second, inadequate to describe how these different resources and relations register in, or otherwise intersect with, cultural production.Footnote16 That is to say, to the extent that one might want to speak of an extractivist aesthetic, there is perhaps not one such aesthetic, but many.

More simply and crudely, in the terms laid out above, we might say that extractivism names a human instrumentalisation of nonhuman nature: the use of nature only as a means toward human ends – or, to be slightly less crudely universalist, a means toward the ends of some subset of humans. The key point is that extractivism, in this specifically material and ecological sense, is only one form of instrumentalisation among many others. In the proliferation of extractivism-talk, however, we notice another troubling aspect of conceptual creep. Enlisted to describe other kinds of exploitative relations – say, among humans, or between humans and other sorts of things, such as texts – ’extractivist’ expands into a synonym for ‘instrumentalist’, in which use implies abuse. This metaphorisation, we argue, involves a simultaneous dematerialisation, losing the very thing that gives extractivism its conceptual bite.

This dematerialisation has rather different implications, depending upon what sorts of relations are being described as extractivist. As Thomas Waller helpfully explains with regard to political economy, contemporary resource extraction under global capitalism has become deeply entangled with broader trends toward financialisation, so that profits are to be made more upon dematerialised abstractions of money than upon the gritty materiality of ‘raw materials’ themselves, in ways qualitatively different from earlier transformations of resources into money. This example offers an important insight about the close and sometimes counterintuitive relationships between extraction and abstraction, words that come from the same Latin root, even if they name putatively distinct processes of ‘taking out’ and ‘taking from’.

The proliferation of extractivist metaphors outside the realm of economic production has a more troubled, often unconsidered relation to the problem of dematerialisation. Particularly tricky are the slippages entailed in the reflexive gestures of literary critics and other humanities scholars who examine other kinds of production – of, say, knowledge, or literature and literary criticism – through the lens of extraction. ‘The colonialist theory of most efficient information retrieval’ is Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s apt formulation to describe the stance of First World-located feminists seeking to produce knowledge about or from – rather than with – women in the Third World.Footnote17 The isomorphism between this model of knowledge production and models of economic production based upon resource extraction may seem evident, but the ‘colonialist theory’ invoked by Spivak is that of anthropology rather than political economy. The operations through which a person becomes a ‘native informant’ are not identical to those through which nonhuman nature becomes a ‘natural resource’.Footnote18 Edward W. Said taught us long ago to recognise disciplines across the humanities and social sciences as modes of power/knowledge constellated in Orientalism and European imperialism. He also insisted, however, upon the varied, ‘uneven exchange’ among ‘power political’, ‘power intellectual’, ‘power cultural’, and ‘power moral’.Footnote19 With regard to extractivism as a critical framework, Said’s insight suggests that the potential gains of identifying congruences among various modes of (ab)using things (human, nonhuman, or inhuman; inanimate or inanimate; material or immaterial) to make or get other things, in situations of unequal power, may be far outweighed by the loss of conceptual precision and force necessary to understand and intervene in the interwoven politics of nature, labour, and knowledge.

With regard to literature and literary studies, the import of extractivist metaphors is complex and multivalent. Attention to the actual materiality of books or their digital equivalents – as in Christine Okoth’s insightful consideration here of TV, computer, and tablet screens – is a salutary reminder of the crucial terrains and itineraries beyond that magical relay between word, eye, and mind that are implicated in the act of reading. The publishing industry exists within global capitalism, not in hygienic isolation from it. Recent theories of world literature modelled after Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems analysis assume a congruence between economic and literary peripheries. This framework, which attends to the ways that literature is imbricated within economic production, is able to grasp, for example, how the extraction and export of bauxite from Ghana can be read through the same lens as the production of a book like Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968). Tracing continuities in economic and affective relations before and after Ghana’s Independence, Armah’s novel grounds the postcolonial disillusion of its unnamed protagonist partly in his job as a railway employee responsible for tracking the movement of trains carrying minerals and timber from the Ghanaian interior to the ‘waiting Greek ships in the harbor’. The ‘wailing whistle of an old steam engine … brought with it a vague taste of sorrow.’Footnote20

Indeed, this link between economic and literary production was the key insight in Jennifer Wenzel’s ‘Petro-Magic-Realism: Toward a Political Ecology of Nigerian Literature’, which identified similarities among what we might now call ‘extractive’ economies involving commodity exports of palm oil, petroleum, and literature-for-publication by metropolitan presses; the nineteenth-century Euro-African trade in palm products was itself a shift toward ‘legitimate’ commerce after the British abolition of the slave trade.Footnote21 Yet what does it mean to understand literature as a commodity within the translocal itineraries assumed by the framework of extractivism? Terian argues here that ‘magical realism was indeed born as a reaction to extractivism’ – an observation that must be juxtaposed with arguments by critics like Graham Huggan, Sarah Brouillette, Stephen Slemon, and Michael Valdez Moses, about the ways in which magical realism also functions as a marketing category for publishers or a homogenising catch-all notion of exotic ‘difference’ for readers.Footnote22 If literature is something like an extractable commodity, then its very production is subject to pressures of demand. Waller emphasizes the pressure of such metropolitan expectations on literary production; he argues suggestively that the spectral non-referentiality of João Paulo Borges Coelho’s Campo de Trânsito must be understood in terms of the ‘correspondence between dematerialised forms of capital and the abstractions of narrative modes’, in which the ‘hemorrhaging of domestic capital’ registers stylistically as a refusal of ‘local colour’.

Learning to read for extractivism while not doing extractivism is, it seems, no simple matter, given these ways in which readers are implicated in the economics of literary production, as well as the proliferation of mining metaphors to describe the acts of reading and interpretation. Yet is reading really so similar to mining? Is meaning really a finite, non-renewable resource, whose production depletes the source (and immiserates those at the site of extraction)? Is the energy consumed or produced by processes of interpretation truly like the burning of fossil fuels? Cronon might argue for a ‘middle ground,’ an interpretive relation of use that is not abuse. With regard to the recent emergence of energy humanities, we would situate Elizabeth Barrios’s central claim – that literary critics did not learn to read oil novels as instances of petroculture until they confronted the threat of climate change – within a much longer, geographically-varied history, to which her own essay attests with its attention to a decades-long tradition of oil novels and petrocriticism in Venezuela.

Literary, literary-critical, and broader civic attention to fossil fuels (perhaps, interestingly, less so to other kinds of extraction) has long been driven by crisis, whether (to name only a few) the dislocations of the ‘oil encounter’ at drill sites around the world, the oil shocks of the 1970s (and subsequent scarcity panics), U.S. wars in the Persian Gulf, the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa in Nigeria, and the one-two punch of Hurricane Katrina and the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the U.S. Gulf Coast. As Frederick Buell has shown, denial about fossil fuels has been punctuated by these moments of periodic crisis and concern, which predate sustained public concern about climate change.Footnote23 Barrios’s excavation of a robust, longstanding tradition of fiction and criticism in Venezuela implicitly contradicts claims (such as those famously made by Amitav Ghosh, writing in 1992, in the wake of the first Gulf War) about the dearth of ‘oil novels’ or lack of critical interest in them, although this exception might well reinforce the rule for which Ghosh argues in his more recent book.Footnote24 Remember Chakrabarty’s assessment of the connection of democracy with energy: seldom has fossil fuel use been explicitly connected with the shape of political forms, and their possibilities or impossibilities (which is not the same as saying that oil has not had a role to play in geopolitics.)Footnote25 Despite the constitutive role played by fossil fuels and other forms of extraction in shaping every aspect of every element of modernity, both in and beyond energy crises, literature has rarely imagined extraction to be anything more than a means of achieving power and money, when it has attended to energy and extraction at all.

Given this constitutive absence, one which is not filled in by recent literary-critical attempts to locate oil fictions wherever they might be, the consolidation of the energy humanities still offers an important transnational forum and comparative perspective to conversations that had previously been contained within national or regional literary traditions (e.g. Venezuela/Latin America or Nigeria/Africa). The lesson we draw from reading Barrios’s essay, given its attention to the Venezuelan example, is the imperative to historicise and provincialise claims about the ‘we’ constituted by petromodernity, so that energy humanities does not entrench as an unexamined universalist norm what are actually bourgeois North American subjectivities shaped by ‘fictions of surplus’, and by distance from sites of extraction.Footnote26 Indeed, we find surprising and instructive resonances among Okoth’s account of the historical intersections between mineral extraction and racial subjection at Elmina Castle (whose very name bears the trace of these superimposed economies), Andrei Rogatchevski’s account of miners’ underground solidarities in Ukraine and beyond, and Krieg’s account of ‘coal optimism’ in Appalachia. These fascinating essays resist the too-easy analytic gesture of simply lumping in humans with nonhuman nature as objects of extraction; they tease apart processes involving the extraction of wealth from beneath the soil and above it, on the one hand, from the related but distinct operations of racialisation or class stratification and solidarity, on the other. In his account of what Stephanie LeMenager might call loving extraction, Krieg attends to ambivalent attachments of those whom an extractivist framework might describe simply as exploited or immiserated.Footnote27 Affect seems to follow a different trajectory in the imaginary than resource flows do in global capitalism – an insight with important implications for politics, as we suggest below.

Our argument up to this point has focused on the dangers of conceding too much conceptual ground to a concept of extraction that has become generalised and generalisable. One of the perils of extractivism is that it tends to flatten the ground, collapsing historical, geographical, and cultural distinctions that should be important to fully understanding the specific operations of extraction, including the ideologies and imaginaries that surround it at any given time and in any given space. There is a second peril that emerges out of this generalisation of extraction, in what might seem at first glance to be a contradictory process. Extractivism enables extraction to become a process writ large, the name for any kind of taking out or drawing out – whether of iron ore and oil, value, work, data, or meaning, or indeed any other process that appears to fit the mould. There’s no problem per se with the metaphoric or rhetorical use of extraction to speak to the outcomes of different practices; literature professors have long urged their students to extract meaning from the texts they’re reading, or to exploit quotes they borrow from others in order to make their own arguments. The problem we are pointing to emerges only when an equivalence is drawn between extraction of this kind – meaning, via the reading of a literary text – and a very different mode of extraction of different sorts of objects: mining coal, drilling for oil, harvesting timber.

Why have these broad connections been made? What critical impulse drives the use of extractivism to simultaneously flatten the ground and, at the same time, to expand the field of extraction to name incommensurable processes at work in very different kinds of practices and activities? For the two of us, the answer lies in a gathering sense of urgency and planetary emergency. Environmental literary criticism has taken on a difficult mission. Like other forms of contemporary criticism, the environmental humanities not only aim to interpret and understand (let’s say, to keep things simple) representations of environment and nature within cultural expression, but also to assess the politics of texts, practices, and performances – and to intervene in these politics. This interpretive work – the work of making careful sense of multivalent processes of mediation – is carried out in relation to a set of questions that demand immediate answers: climate change and the threat posed by human activity such as extraction to everything on the planet, living and non-living. There is a necessary urgency to this work; there is a desire for critical writing to be part of the solution to climate change, to participate in whatever way it can in activating new relations and imaginaries that would, for example, take the place of resource logics. Everything depends on it.

But just how can literary criticism have an impact on the environment? How can it effectively take on the dual mission it has set itself as a critical practice? The two of us have certainly struggled with these questions ourselves, as we’ve wondered about how a professionalised practice with a very small audience composed almost exclusively of fellow professionals can intervene in climate change and other crises with the same impact that, for instance, movements of Indigenous people or large eNGOs have managed to do. As humanities scholars, what form does our politics take? Just whom are we speaking to when we write about processes like extraction? Pondering a similar set of questions, Lawrence Buell suggested that professors and teachers of ecocriticism had an impact through a kind of ‘trickle down’ effect: students who took classes with environmentally-minded critics would slowly spread the word, so that environmental consciousness would move through the population like a virus and change dominant ideologies about nature subtly, but powerfully.Footnote28 As we have all learned, some viruses do spread quickly. But others move very slowly indeed, especially given the number of students enrolled in English programmes, and the fewer still who take classes devoted specifically to eco-criticism.

Extractivism seems to offer a way around some of the anxieties and doubts that surround this nagging question of why we do the work we do, in the midst of the troubles we face. If extraction names simply the removal of natural resources from the earth, there really isn’t very much that literary criticism can say about it, at least not for the reasons and with the effect it hopes to have by assessing extraction in the first place. There are other disciplines that speak to specific politics surrounding a site of extraction with more force than we do, and there are other voices – journalists, policymakers, those working for NGOs, filmmakers, and artists – who have more successfully raised attention to the systemic violence that attends extraction.

But note: the moment one adds the suffix -ism to the noun, extraction is transformed into a system or ideology, a representational and symbolic space linked to the use (and abuse) of nature-as-resource. Here, suddenly, extraction is made available to humanists, who can set themselves the task of naming and codifying the elements comprising this ideology, whether understood as extraction’s backstory or the ongoing mechanisms that permit the violent continuation of extraction. The gritty materiality of extractivism is a way of getting one’s critical hands dirty, in a good way. For literary critics, this work on ideology takes place in relation to literary texts, tracking how they tacitly participate in the production of extractivism, which is always understood in advance to extend well beyond the literary into other representational realms, or probing those texts that imagine themselves as also naming extractivism – a form of literary politics distinct from merely registering or representing extraction itself. By naming, we have in mind the kinds of moves that bring into focus the hitherto unsaid, unseen, tacit, implicit, ambient, air-we-breathe assumptions, norms, and forces that suffuse texts and lifeworlds alike – sometimes through a figure-ground reversal in which the taken-for-granted becomes impossible to ignore. One might say that a particularly sophisticated mode of such naming also looks reflexively at the critic’s own practice and situation, so that possible (if problematic) homologies between, say, reading and mining loom large.

It is probably for this reason that extractivism gets written into all manner of practices. The presumption is that a dominant ideology is absorbed by every practice, by every aspect of a given configuration of power.Footnote29 Thus, once one starts reading for oil or looking for extractivism, one finds and names it everywhere – but on freshly flattened ground. And after such naming, then what? Out in the world, the digging continues. This is not to say that critical or pedagogical work has no effect, but to acknowledge that the site of its intervention is almost never the site of extraction. And that a critical goal set in advance of reading any given text is likely to find holy grails that impede a more complex understanding of the text, the world, and the critic’s place in it. (Relevant here is the sometime reduction of ‘theory’ to a pre-constituted set of assumptions about the precise nature of social and political forces and practices, taken from outside the realm of the literary, and ‘applied’ to the text at hand, thereby demonstrating the validity of the theory – as opposed to attending to the modes of intelligence and forms of mediation at work within the text and the critic’s relation to it, and how they intersect with those forces and practices in ways that the ‘theory’ cannot predict.) All too often, in other words, naming extractivism as an ideology to be interrogated means the critic knows in advance how to think about the text, rather than thinking with it, or watching it think.

At worst, the invocation of a word like extractivism may be a shortcut for establishing one’s political bona fides, possibly in a litany of badness as described above. The invocation of a concept like Jacques Rancière’s ‘distribution of the sensible’, for example, may assume that the critic can muster sufficient leverage or traction to accomplish the work of redistribution, while forgetting that critics and authors inhabit the regime of the sensible on which they hope to work.Footnote30 Or that other kinds of redistribution – for which criticism and theory offer less immediate results – remain urgently necessary. And still, out in the world, the digging continues. The two of us worry, in other words, about these ways in which literature and literary criticism imagine for themselves a lead role in the game of politics that is almost in inverse proportion to their actual social import at the present moment – wanting, like Mungau in Borges Coelho’s Campo de Trânsito, to see the world with bigger eyes than those we possess. As Krieg writes bleakly, there is a world of difference between literature understood as a mode of affect management, on the one hand, and undertaking ‘material struggles for democratic control over the means by which society reproduces itself’, on the other. A similar tension is at work in Parks’s citation of Mark Nowak’s trenchant query, ‘“Where are the poems in dialogue with these global peoples’ movements?”’. To put it all too bluntly: despite the laudable (and necessary) ethical and political aims that underlie the literary critical interrogation of extractivism, in the very worst forms of its expression it risks becoming simply a means of making it possible for criticism to believe itself to be participating actively in environmental change, by contributing disciplinary insights that can come from nowhere else. Okoth perhaps has a similar concern in mind when she observes that literature’s role is not merely diagnostic, ‘pointing to sites of extraction across the globe and lamenting the state of ecological damage. Rather, literature can identify the forms that extraction produces and appropriate those same forms in pursuit of politically and culturally formal reinvention’.