Structures of Indifference in extractive-imperial formations: An Atlantic study in unknowing Canadian imperialism in James Bay, Haiti, and South Africa

Abstract

What constitutes and maintains the structures of indifference that enable ongoing extractive plunder by the Canadian polity? As a consequence of taking the erasure of plunder as a starting point, we are invited to examine how contested extractive processes unfold in space and time: their speculative ‘buzz’ phase, their toxifying phase, and their many traumatic after-lives. That such extractive processes always have an emplaced aspect in a ‘site’ where we can encounter them in research or classification goes without saying, but of particular importance to my research are its embodied aspects, which are transmissible across space and generations insofar as communities under extractive pressure are toxified and restructured into no-places of unrestrained profit-potential, marked by monopolistic or oligopolistic life-worlds of expulsion. Two questions arising from this attention to lived communal experiences of extraction and explored across the cases are: what do those displaced by extraction carry with them? How are transversal projects of resistance articulated?

Keywords

Citizenship, Colonial/postcolonial, Transnational, Extraction, Indifference