Title Information
Title
Critique of Extractive Reason: Time and the Elemental Coloniality of Capitalism
Type of Resource (primo)
dissertations
Name: Personal
Name Part
Nagelhout, Marah C
Role
Role Term: Text
creator
Name: Personal
Name Part
Bewes, Timothy
Role
Role Term: Text
Advisor
Name: Personal
Name Part
Quashie, Kevin
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Personal
Name Part
Ramírez-D’Oleo, Dixa
Role
Role Term: Text
Reader
Name: Corporate
Name Part
Brown University. Department of English
Role
Role Term: Text
sponsor
Origin Information
Copyright Date
2025
Physical Description
Extent
9, 214 p.
digitalOrigin
born digital
Note: thesis
Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2025
Genre (aat)
theses
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.
Subject
Topic
Black feminist literature
Subject
Topic
settler colonialism
Subject (fast) (authorityURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast", valueURI="http://id.worldcat.org/fast/00901428")
Topic
Ecocriticism
Subject
Topic
racial capitalism
Subject
Topic
Mining
Subject
Topic
Abolition
Subject
Topic
Marxism
Language
Language Term (ISO639-2B)
English
Record Information
Record Content Source (marcorg)
RPB
Record Creation Date (encoding="iso8601")
20251201