Macarena Gómez-Barris refuses to abandon the hope for a future after extractivism

Macarena Gómez-Barris is a writer and scholar with a focus on queer ecologies and decolonial theory and praxis. She is author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (2017) and Beyond the Pink Tide: Art and Political Undercurrents in the Américas (2018), among several other texts. She is working on a new book, At the Sea’s Edge that reflects on the space between land and sea, as well as other creative writing projects. In this conversation she talks about solidarity. Solidarity in and among the Global South, against empire and extraction, and for a world to come. There’s a great deal of hope in this interview, but it’s the kind of hope that resonates with me because it says that, in Gómez-Barris’ words, “Knowledge production can also be solidarity” if it is “multivocal” and focused on exposing dispossession. Looking for this kind of solidarity, she finds something generative in the “third space of shadow terms between above and below.” For her, this is generative because it moves away from the “binarized language forms we typically use” and returns to things that have been largely submerged by oppressive forces. I think the focus on multiplicity and plurality is potentially helpful for those that are locked in different sorts of colonial spaces where it’s typically seen as sort of unrealistic or unimportant. Gomez-Barris says, instead, it’s actually this sort of experimentation that is going to liberate the globe. We devote time at the end of our conversation to the question of Gaza. Gómez-Barris makes clear that there is a proliferating resistance to that escalating settler colonial violence that demands to be reckoned with. People who are already aware of Gomez-Barris’ writing will know that she is really precise about the world-ending force of extractivism. What she says is that “the extractive zone” ultimately reduces “life to capitalist resource conversion” and trains us to “reduce life to systems.” That is not a thing that is natural, and it’s not a thing we need to accept.