Extractivism structures life and death through extractive landscapes---that inscribes itself onto subaltern bodies and results in material violence against Black and brown bodies

Extractivism extends beyond the moment of removal, beyond the territory of the ‘extractive zone’ (Gómez-Barris, 2017), to a system's logics and, ultimately, is marked upon lands, waters, food pathways, bodies and knowledges. Extractivism relies on multiple and changing modes of domination, compelling decolonial scholar-activists to seek out decolonial liminalities (Murrey & Jackson, 2020; Sakshi, 2021). Such liminalities are deliberately situated ways of knowing that emerge from experiences and knowledge of the violence of extractivism, but cannot yet comprehend totalising or closed resolutions, nor the end of the colonial-extractive story because these dynamics must be known in praxis; they are unravelled through living, and they are extricated through struggle. Drawing upon anti-colonial modes of relationality, decolonial liminalities can incubate ways of knowing and praxis for land–body decolonisation (Cabnal, 2015; Sweet & Ortiz Escalante, 2017; Zaragocin, 2019). Decolonial liminalities resist colonial mechanisms of power, but this defiance is coupled with an awareness of both the longevity and the temporality of ongoing colonial modes of being (Daley & Murrey, 2022; Lugones, 2007). As such, anti-colonial liminalities do not foreclose possibilities for intellectual solidarity by maintaining that this project will be immediate, straightforward or painless.1 Liminality is important as a component of these socio-political and ecological processes as it opens up cracks in the temporal foundation of modernity/coloniality, exposing the potentials of the in-between, bordering spaces in which radical transition, futurity and decolonial pluriversality are thinkable. In this article, we analyse the concrete and embodied consequences of ‘extractive logics’ shaping life and death in two quite different developmental contexts. Drawing from original fieldwork on tourism and sexual exploitation in the archipelago of Bocas del Toro, located on the Caribbean coast of Panama, we demonstrate how the intersection of land and body creates extractive landscapes that involve far more than just mineral extraction. Next, drawing on more recent fieldwork in Central Africa along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline (see Figure 1), we examine how development plans discounted HIV burdens as a justifiable trade-off of capitalist growth. In both contexts, we mobilise a conception of ‘extractive logics’ to name the unnamed, unquestioned and often contradictory epistemic frameworks that allow extractivist relations of removal and destruction to persist despite damage and death for those on the frontlines of development (see also Murrey et al., 2023). We see that the logics behind extractivism are more than simply capitalist. We argue that the political ecologies and political economies of survival for people living in extractive zones are embodied matters. Neoliberal expropriations of land and other wealth inscribes itself on women's bodies, even as they seek means to maintain lives of dignity. Extractive logics ensnare women's bodies in particular racialised and gendered fashion. The logics which underpin extraction – what Kathryn Yusoff (2018, p. 59) calls the ‘geologics’ of extraction – establish ‘particular bodies and subject positions … as disposable in the shadow economy of extraction’. Along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline, we show how engineered disposability was compounded by neoliberal programme logics in which the corporate extractive industries were mobilised to address the very virus that their operations had aggravated. Through subsequent oil consortium- and state-led activities, illnesses were addressed individually, as if reflecting ‘poor choices’ of the person. These atomised understandings of and management of the virus impeded possibilities for collective resistances. Entities within the ‘oil complex’ (Watts, 2005) laud their own institutional responses to predicted rising rates of HIV in ways that would further preserve rather than challenge the fundamental falsehood of extractive logics: the myth of resource extraction as development. The active processes which expose women's bodies to illness, sexual violence and harm are folded back into extractivism's self-celebratory narratives. At the same time, economic techniques and technocratic language would render the concrete and material violence done through these practices as illegible. Positioning our document analysis alongside people's experiences in communities along the pipeline right-of-way reveals women's resilience, dignity and capacities to hustle in times of distress and deprivation, despite hostile, racist and sexualised extractive logics. We find inspiration in Gargi Bhattacharyya's (2018, p. xi) provocation to look ‘in the shadows where capital meets other histories of dispossession’. These ‘shadows’ are explicit in the extraction-attendant violence writ upon people's bodies, and Black and Indigenous women's bodies in particular. Building on decolonial feminist scholarship between and across political economy and political ecology, we supplement scholarly work on eco-territoriality. This includes important work on land–body relations and attention to how extractive logics and processes simultaneously harm land, ecologies and human bodies in continuous, fluctuating and overlapping ways. By scaling up from the body, we more fully conceptualise the scope and range of extractivisms, and direct our analysis towards the political possibilities of consciousness-raising around shared grievances and experiences. This provides an important counterbalance to the methodological nationalism of much of the scholarship on extraction. Methodological nationalism – or the practice of restricting our analysis to certain nation states or regions – can be analytically debilitating because it obfuscates ‘how deeply intertwined global supply chains … are in the sociometabolic production and reproduction’ of extractivist paradigms (Arboleda, 2020, p. 5). We move away from methodological nationalism by seeking new avenues of cross-fertilisation between what have been discrete scholarly endeavours (i.e., tourism and oil extraction) and regimented world regions (i.e., against the tendency for extractive scholarship to reproduce regional and sub-regional specialisms; see also Caretta et al., 2020). Our work seeks to embrace these conceptual provocations and methodological challenges while pushing the dial up further, as we focus on women's experiences of embodied violence. To do so, we work within decolonial feminist scholarship on land–body entanglements building upon the work of Mayan Q'eqchi'-xinka feminist Lorena Cabnal's concept of territorio cuerpo-tierra or cuerpo-territorio (2015), the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2007), and critiques of the intersections of racial violence and extractivism (Butler, 2015; Davis, 2019; Yusoff, 2018). We nourish the necessary project of emphasising the centrality of survival and people's bodies, particularly Black women's bodies, in understanding what extractive logics actually and concretely do. And, by extension, we seek to speak to the magnitude of extraction not through generalisation or theoretical abstraction but through grounded considerations of situated lives and the basic material and moments that constitute people's agency, survival, redress and repair in geographies of extraction (Noxolo, 2022).