Re-Mapping Contemporary Extractivism

Originally coined by Latin American decolonial thinkers, the term extractivism critiques unsustainable economic models rooted in dispossession, plunder, and the appropriation of natural resources in the Global South. Since then, the concept has been expanded to theorize emerging regimes of accumulation within the contemporary world-system. In his recent trilogy, Achille Mbembe reorients debates on extractivism beyond mineral and resource extraction, emphasizing instead the extraction of bodies—“the slow combustion” of “debased bodies, energies, and lives.” These extracted bodies form the substrate of a new planetary circuit of value, governed by what Mbembe calls “governance by capture,” and sustained by proliferating regimes of surveillance and incarceration.

Building on this trajectory, political theorists such as Verónica Gago and Sandro Mezzadra have expanded the framework of extractivism to encompass the workings of capital across new “frontiers”—from data and crypto “mining” in platform economies to “urban extractivism” through gentrification and housing financialization. Drawing on this critical genealogy, this seminar revisits extractivism as a lens for understanding the evolving metabolism of global capitalism. It foregrounds the heterogeneous, layered extractive techniques that define our moment—ranging from racialized dispossession and financial rent-seeking to algorithmic capture, knowledge mining, and ecological enclosure—while interrogating their entanglements with enduring colonial and imperial legacies.

While recent scholarship has begun to compare extractivism across imperial formations, settler-colonial projects, and nation-states, less attention has been paid to the inter-relations among distinct extractive operations. These operations are often mutually reinforcing but also marked by friction and contradiction—from Gago’s “financial extractivism” to what Matteo Pasquinelli and Vladan Joler describe as AI’s “knowledge extractivism.” This seminar seeks to address this gap by exploring how contemporary extractive techniques—operating across frontiers—are registered in literary and cultural texts, whether by reinforcing, resisting, or reconfiguring extractive logics.

Following Eduardo Gudynas’s warning against diluting the term by applying it too broadly, we approach extractivism not as a catch-all but as a method: a way to critically analyze how specific extractive techniques are localized and materialized through infrastructures that shape a new spatial order of global accumulation. We invite contributions that trace these processes of territorialization and examine the semiotics, poetics, and world-building practices that emerge from extractive-scapes across the globe. At the same time, we welcome engagements with radical aesthetic practices that seek to contest, dismantle, or re-appropriate the architectures and technologies of extraction underlying contemporary capitalism.