In The Extractive Zone Macarena Gómez-Barris traces the political, aesthetic, and performative practices that emerge in opposition to the ruinous effects of extractive capital. The work of Indigenous activists, intellectuals, and artists in spaces Gómez-Barris labels extractive zones—majority indigenous regions in South America noted for their biodiversity and long history of exploitative natural resource extraction—resist and refuse the terms of racial capital and the continued legacies of colonialism. Extending decolonial theory with race, sexuality, and critical Indigenous studies, Gómez-Barris develops new vocabularies for alternative forms of social and political life. She shows how from Colombia to southern Chile artists like filmmaker Huichaqueo Perez and visual artist Carolina Caycedo formulate decolonial aesthetics. She also examines the decolonizing politics of a Bolivian anarcho-feminist collective and a coalition in eastern Ecuador that protects the region from oil drilling. In so doing, Gómez-Barris reveals the continued presence of colonial logics and locates emergent modes of living beyond the boundaries of destructive extractive capital.

"The Extractive Zone offers a glimpse into what kind of world may be possible through the everyday practices and knowledges of submerged perspectives." - The New Inquiry

"A timely study. . . . The result of substantive situated fieldwork. . . . There may be no greater testament to the value and urgency of decolonial approaches to embodied vernacular knowledge today." - TDR: The Drama Review

"Gómez-Barris’s compelling text grapples with the destruction and death dealt by extractive industries. . . . This is all provocative and engaging material, particularly when set against political economic critiques of extractivism." - The Americas

"Gómez-Barris’s writing provides an anecdote to technocratic visions of 'green capitalism' by foregrounding questions of justice, identity, and the contingency of politics. Scholars interested in the debates animating anti-extractive social movements in Latin America and beyond should begin here." - Enterprise & Society

"The Extractive Zone contributes an important feminist and indigenous hemispheric genealogy and cultural studies lens on current political economic debates circulating in Latin America and beyond regarding alternatives to growth-oriented, capitalist and extractive-based models of development. The book also complicates heroic and romantic readings of the conceptual and legal mechanisms surrounding the state-based rhetoric of buen vivir in Latin American constitutionalism that too often appear uncritically examined in scholarship produced in the global North." - Journal of Latin American Studies