Faculty Brown Bag with Prof. Stacey Balkan | Figuring Extraction: Jamaica Kincaid’s Black Anthropocene Vistas
Please save the date for our second Brown Bag talk of the academic year. On Tuesday, November 15th at 12:00pm, Professor Stacey Balkan will deliver a talk titled "Figuring Extraction: Jamaica Kincaid’s Black Anthropocene Vistas.”
Abstract: Charting the genealogy of what she terms a “white geology,” Kathryn Yusoff argues for an understanding of “colonial geologics” that acknowledges the immiscible chronologies of imperial systems of taxonomy, extractive capitalism, and the production of disposable populations of laborers—the “cheap labor” to which François Vergés refers when articulating a world ecology organized by global networks of human and nonhuman capital. Both may also be understood as “cheap nature,” which is to say the onto-epistemological reconfiguration of Earth systems through the lens of a “white biology,” and the consequent regimes of resource colonization that constituted, among other examples, the triangular trade in sugar and timber. If we understand the plantation economies of Antigua or Dominica as a nodal point in the production of a global network of cheap natures, we might read Jamaica Kincaid’s novel The Autobiography of my Mother as a productive entré into discussions of imperial taxonomy—that which augured new forms of extractivist violence in her childhood home of Antigua. The novel attends to the enclosure of Native forests and the aforementioned reconfiguration of local landscapes via such taxonomic simplifications—something that also marks Kincaid’s “gardening” columns for The New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine. In this essay, I shall chart the construction of a “colonial geologic” through Kincaid’s scathing nonfiction critiques of the “flowers of empire”; and I shall then read the novel through the lens of a “racial capitalocene” made possible by such imperial logics.
image by The Digital Artist; licensed under CC0 / public domain declaration
image credit: brown paper bag by clikr, licensed under CC0 / public domain declaration