Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-j824f Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-07T07:24:55.073Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Chapter 2 - Eco-Criticism and Primitive Accumulation in Indigenous Studies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 March 2022

Colleen Lye
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
Christopher Nealon
Affiliation:
Johns Hopkins University
Get access

Summary

This chapter explores the ways in which settler colonial racial capitalism designates Indigenous lands as nonsites of nuclear modernity, making them available for what Traci Brynne Voyles calls “wastelanding.” These are sites that are deemed unproductive, backward, and peripheral to the technological superiority of the global north but are nevertheless mined for “resources.” By homing in on the cycles of accumulation associated with uranium mining that largely occurs on Indigenous lands, I grapple with Marx’s theory of “so-called primitive accumulation” as a constitutive, contemporary, and violent extra-economic logic of settler colonial racial capitalism. Drawing on a range of theorists from classical Marxist to Critical Indigenous Studies tradition – including Peter Kropotkin, Rosa Luxemburg, Glen Coulthard, and Robert Nichols – I lead readers to the role of colonial dispossession in relation to the conceptual category of land in Capital, Vol. 1. Both building on and departing from recent revisionist accounts of primitive accumulation, I argue that Marx’s commentary on colonialism reveals the parasitic role of the state and how primitive accumulation functions as a race-making operation that is a necessary precondition for the present and future accumulation of capital.

Type
Chapter
Information
After Marx
Literature, Theory, and Value in the Twenty-First Century
, pp. 40 - 54
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bhandar, Brenna. Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. Duke University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Coulthard, Glen. Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. University of California Press, 2007.Google Scholar
Harris, Cheryl. “Whiteness as Property.” Harvard Law Review, vol. 106, no. 8, 1993, pp. 17071791.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford University Press, 2003.Google Scholar
Hecht, Gabrielle. Being Nuclear: Africans and the Global Uranium Trade. MIT Press, 2012.Google Scholar
Karuka, Manu. Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad. University of California Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Kelley, Robin D. G.The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native.” American Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 2, 2017, pp. 267276.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
King, Tiffany Lethabo. The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies. Duke University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Kropotkin, Peter. The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings . Cambridge University Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Lee, Erica Violet. “In Defense of the Wastelands: A Survival Guide.” Guts Magazine, November 2016, http://gutsmagazine.ca/wastelands.Google Scholar
Luxemburg, Rosa. The Accumulation of Capital. Martino Publishing, 2015.Google Scholar
Marx, Karl. Capital: Vol. 1, translated by Fowkes, Ben . Penguin Books, 1976.Google Scholar
Mezzadra, Sandro and Neilson, Brett. The Politics of Operations: Excavating Contemporary Capitalism. Duke University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Nichols, Robert. Theft Is Property! Dispossession and Critical Theory . Duke University Press, 2020.Google Scholar
Nichols, Robert. “Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation.” Radical Philosophy, vol. 194, 2015, pp. 1828.Google Scholar
Postone, Moishe. “Anti-Semitism and National Socialism: Notes on the German Reaction to ‘Holocaust.’” New German Critique, vol. 19, no. 1, 1980, pp. 97115.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roberts, William Clare. “What Was Primitive Accumulation? Reconstructing the Origin of a Critical Concept.” European Journal of Political Theory, vol. 19, no. 4, 2017, pp. 121.Google Scholar
Sanyal, Kanyal. Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism. Routledge, 2012.Google Scholar
Simpson, Leanne. As We Have Always Done. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Adam. Wealth of Nations . Knopf, 1991.Google Scholar
Voyles, Traci Brynne. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country. University of Minnesota Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Wallace, Molly. Risk Criticism: Precautionary Reading in an Age of Environmental Uncertainty . University of Michigan Press, 2016.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×