A world in reverse: The political ecology of racial capitalism

Abstract

This article advances a ‘political ecology of racial capitalism’ approach to further our understanding of the underlying systemic relations and logics of power driving planetary ecological crises. The particular concern here is to demonstrate how race underwrites the distinctively exhaustive society/nature relation fuelling both the productive excess and ecological exhaustion of the capitalist world-system. It does so by first identifying, as a foundational space-time of racial capitalism, a socio-ecological contact zone within which Indigenous and Black peoples’ earth-worlding capacity, situated in deep time and place, is indispensable to the survival of ‘late arriving’ Euro-Western settlers. It is out of the refusal of an emergent settler-master to recognize their dependence upon Indigenous and Black earth-world-making gifts that, this article argues, race emerges as a structuring relation of power transmuting such earth-worlds into lands and bodies given by nature/Earth. Such a transmutation functions to conceal the underlying reproductive conditions – Indigenous and Black earth-worlding capacity – of that which is now marked as nature/Earth. It is, then, the racialized production of nature that accounts, ultimately, for both the excess (from appropriation of Indigenous and Black earth-worlds) and exhaustion (from erasure of their constituting conditions) of the political ecology of racial capitalism.