Toward healthier futures in post‐pandemic times: Political ecology, racial capitalism, and black feminist approaches to care

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abigail H. Neely ◽  
Patricia J. Lopez
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Racial Capitalism

scholarly journals Decaying infrastructures in the post-industrial city: An urban political ecology of the US pipeline crisis

2019 ◽  
pp. 251484861989051
Author(s):  
Jonathan Silver
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Social Reproduction ◽  
Urban Political Ecology ◽  
Urban Inequality ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
The Us ◽  
Global North ◽  
Essential Resource ◽  
Post Industrial ◽  
Fully Functioning

Infrastructure is critical to the ways in which urban inequality is produced and experienced. Across US post-industrial contexts urban infrastructures are decaying, causing problems to the capacity of various systems to deliver essential resource flows for social reproduction. This paper examines the US pipeline crisis to understand why, how and with what effects infrastructure has undergone a process of physical decay, concentrated across inner-city areas. It uses a case study of Camden, New Jersey, a poor city in which infrastructure has undergone decades of neglect, privatisation and under-maintenance. This decay has created difficulties in sustaining a safe, universal and fully functioning infrastructure. To understand these dynamics, the paper advances an urban political ecology approach to examining these infrastructural geographies. It makes three key contributions. First, it considers how to conceptualise decay and its effect on the urban circulations that have been enabled/disabled by infrastructure through the notion of unbounding. Second, given the highly segregated infrastructural experiences between a black city and white suburbs, the paper draws on recent geographic scholarship on racial capitalism, emphasising the role of race in the governing of infrastructure and in accounting for Camden’s conditions of decay. Third, the paper advances a relational theorisation that draws on concepts emanating from urban political ecology and associated research on infrastructure in cities of the global South. With the reported, widespread decay of infrastructures in global North, post-industrial contexts, a relational theorisation can draw on long-established vocabularies that challenge where we locate the ‘infrastructural South’ and prompt new political urban questions.

Little Monsters

2018 ◽  
pp. 129-150
Author(s):  
Tavia Nyong'o
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
The World

Intervening in debates over post-humanist responses to climate change, this chapter engages black feminist and indigenous critique to explore the role afro-fabulation plays in contemporary catastrophism. Reading the play and film Beasts of the Southern Wild in relation to a Foucauldian and indigenous critique of sovereignty, this chapter argues that our dreams of rewilding the world after racial capitalism will still need to be decolonized.

scholarly journals The domestic geopolitics of racial capitalism

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 1160-1179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pavithra Vasudevan ◽  
Sara Smith
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Reproductive Labor ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Feminist Geopolitics ◽  
Political Work ◽  
The Us ◽  
Social Reproductive Labor ◽  
Domestic Form

In this paper, we analyze the racialized burden of toxicity in the US as a case study of what we call “domestic geopolitics.” Drawing on the case studies of Badin, North Carolina, and Flint, Michigan, we argue that maintaining life in conditions of racialized toxicity is not only a matter of survival, but also a geopolitical praxis. We propose the term domestic geopolitics to describe a reconceived feminist geopolitics integrating an analysis of Black geographies as a domestic form of colonialism, with an expanded understanding of domesticity as political work. We develop the domestic geopolitics framework based on the dual meaning of domestic: the inward facing geopolitics of racialization and the resistance embodied in domestic labors of maintaining life, home, and community. Drawing on Black feminist scholars, we describe three categories of social reproductive labor in conditions of racialized toxicity: the labor of keeping wake, the labor of tactical expertise, and the labor of revolutionary mothering. We argue that Black survival struggles exemplify a domestic geopolitics of everyday warfare against racial capitalism’s onslaught.

A world in reverse: The political ecology of racial capitalism

Politics ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 026339572199443
Author(s):  
Bikrum Singh Gill
Keyword(s):  
Political Ecology ◽  
Contact Zone ◽  
World System ◽  
Space Time ◽  
The Political ◽  
Deep Time ◽  
Racial Capitalism ◽  
Capitalist World ◽  
Production Of Nature

This article advances a ‘political ecology of racial capitalism’ approach to further our understanding of the underlying systemic relations and logics of power driving planetary ecological crises. The particular concern here is to demonstrate how race underwrites the distinctively exhaustive society/nature relation fuelling both the productive excess and ecological exhaustion of the capitalist world-system. It does so by first identifying, as a foundational space-time of racial capitalism, a socio-ecological contact zone within which Indigenous and Black peoples’ earth-worlding capacity, situated in deep time and place, is indispensable to the survival of ‘late arriving’ Euro-Western settlers. It is out of the refusal of an emergent settler-master to recognize their dependence upon Indigenous and Black earth-world-making gifts that, this article argues, race emerges as a structuring relation of power transmuting such earth-worlds into lands and bodies given by nature/Earth. Such a transmutation functions to conceal the underlying reproductive conditions – Indigenous and Black earth-worlding capacity – of that which is now marked as nature/Earth. It is, then, the racialized production of nature that accounts, ultimately, for both the excess (from appropriation of Indigenous and Black earth-worlds) and exhaustion (from erasure of their constituting conditions) of the political ecology of racial capitalism.

Twenty-Five Years after Sa-I-Gu: Multiracial Politics in Times of Crisis

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Chang ◽  
Daniel Martinez HoSang ◽  
Soya Jung ◽  
Chandan Reddy ◽  
Alex Tom
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Mass Culture ◽  
Police Officers ◽  
Critical Consciousness ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
The State ◽  
Racial Capitalism

We chose to frame this conversation in terms of crisis: not only the state of permanent crisis created by racial capitalism and settler colonialism but also specific flashpoints like Sa-I-Gu [the Korean term for the April 1992 uprising in Los Angeles after the acquittal of the police officers involved in the Rodney King beating]. We want to look at the conditions surrounding these flashpoints and the responses to them that then shaped race consciousness and politics subsequently. Today we have no shortage of crisis, no shortage of flashpoints. And yet there is hope. Perhaps more than at any other time in my lifetime, there are opportunities to shift mass culture, at the very least to popularize and normalize a slightly more critical consciousness. So now I want to turn to my friends here to talk about crisis and multiracial politics. We’ll start with Sa-I-Gu and work forward to this moment and also to future possibilities.

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