Extractivism and Universality
Product details
- ISBN 9781032386126
- Weight: 453g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 10 Feb 2023
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Hardback
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What are the possibilities for a radical politics of universal humanity, at a time when the politics of identity increasingly defines the agenda of the left? What are the political and conceptual implications of such an emancipatory form of universality emerging through the struggles of Indigenous peoples on the extractive frontiers of global capitalism? How do such battles play out on the ground, and how should they be researched and conveyed?
Extractivism and Universality takes an unorthodox approach to these timely questions. It tells the inside story of a spontaneous uprising in the Ecuadorian Amazon in 2017, in which mestizo, Black, and Indigenous workers and communities confronted the combined forces of a multinational oil company and a militarized state. The book documents a rapidly evolving battle that achieved a remarkable victory and captures the flourishing of an insurgent form of political universality in which racial, ethnic, and cultural divisions were suddenly and powerfully overcome. Intervening in debates on the resistances and alternatives developed by the inhabitants of resource extraction zones, it takes the reader deep inside a rebellion on an Amazonian oil frontier and offers a unique insight into insurgent universality in the lived reality of its material existence. It argues that the dominant decolonial dichotomy between Eurocentric universalism and an Indigenous pluriverse should be replaced by an approach that is attentive to manifestations of universality performed by diverse subaltern subjects. And it does so through a fast-paced fusion of radical political theory with the raw first-person style of gonzo journalism. It will appeal to scholars and students across the social sciences with interests in political and social theory, social movements, labor relations, and the political ecology of extractivism.
Japhy Wilson is Honorary Research Fellow in Politics at the University of Manchester. His research explores the politics of development and the possibilities of radical transformation under conditions of global capitalism. He is the author of Reality of Dreams: Post-Neoliberal Utopias in the Ecuadorian Amazon (Yale University Press) and Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid (Verso), and co-editor of The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics (Edinburgh University Press).
