Description
- Abstract:
- Abstract of CRITIQUE OF EXTRACTIVE REASON: TIME AND THE ELEMENTAL COLONIALITY OF CAPITALISM by MARAH NAGELHOUT, Ph.D., Brown University, October 2025 This dissertation shows how the racializing function of colonial mining inaugurated in the Spanish conquest of the New World is systematized by capitalism and reproduced in subsequent eras of human and non-human energy capture. Through comparative engagement with the works of Sylvia Wynter and Karl Marx, I show how the metallurgic valuation central to the creation of a global currency and the racial valuation central to the epistemic revolution of Western humanism converge into a racial economy of knowledge that stubbornly persists in—and is reified by—the continuing allegiance between mining industries and the carceral state. I argue that this irreparably racialized extractive paradigm is reproduced in capital’s structural mandate for depletable land and labor and sedimented in the very value form of capital itself. The “extractive reason” of colonial conquest is thus reborn as capitalism’s dialectic of extraction and abstraction, that is, as both a material motive and mode of knowledge production. My specific attention to the temporal constituency of value facilitates an account of the state’s role in producing what Marx calls “disposable time.” Disposable time, I argue, is the time of reproductive precarity, legal bureaucracy, and the prison sentence. It is the temporality of weaponized contingency whereby past extractive violence, from policing to pollution, suspends subjects in anticipation of future violence. Beyond the mine and the prison, I show how the extractive law of value and its motive temporal force structures the classroom, home, and community space be it through pedagogic hierarchy or the false (and persistently gendered) dichotomization of care work and politics. To theorize these intersecting aims, my dissertation foregrounds the works of black feminist authors such as Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, and Toni Cade Bambara as they make visible the bodily, ecological, and social effects of extraction at the level of content, while negotiating the temporal architectures of abstraction at the level of form. In this way, I read texts such as The Salt Eaters and Sula as critiques of extractive reason that theorize the limits and exigency of abolitionist ecological world-making by staging, in multivalent ways, confrontations between blackness and value.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2025
Citation
Nagelhout, Marah C.,
"Critique of Extractive Reason: Time and the Elemental Coloniality of Capitalism"
(2025).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:qj4cs76t/
