“Extractivism and dispossession have a long history in the formation and transformation of the colonial matrix of power. Macarena Gómez-Barris provides a well-crafted theoretical and empirical update of this important dimension of coloniality hidden under the promises of modernity.” - Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options
"Macarena Gómez-Barris makes several major contributions that shed new light on the ways extractivism operates while identifying pathways for seeing, imagining, and living beyond the imperatives of coloniality. Grounded in feminist and decolonial thinking, The Extractive Zone advances a methodology that refuses to separate the fight against extractivism from the struggle against modern colonial and patriarchal relations." - Nelson Maldonado-Torres, author of Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity
“With astute precision, lyrical eloquence, and intellectual self-reflexivity, Macarena Gómez-Barris take us on a journey through Indigenous and Afro-Indigenous spaces in South America to imagine the extractive zone anew. In queering decoloniality, Gómez-Barris not only illuminates the hidden, the unseen, and that which is often neglected; she fosters an inspiring decolonial queer femme analytics. This brilliant book will make vital interventions for many years to come.” - Emma Pérez, author of The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History
"The Extractive Zone offers a glimpse into what kind of world may be possible through the everyday practices and knowledges of submerged perspectives." - Megan Spencer, The New Inquiry
"A timely study. . . . The result of substantive situated fieldwork. . . . There may be no greater testament to the value and urgency of decolonial approaches to embodied vernacular knowledge today." - Kimberly Richards, TDR: The Drama Review
"Gómez-Barris’ rich, multilayered text is notable for its explicit attention to the methodological and analytical pitfalls of the academic study of the periphery, pitfalls that academic scholarship alone will never overcome, as the latter both reflects and reproduces the stark inequities that structure the global order. The Extractive Zone raises thorny questions that we ought to grapple with more broadly, as a community of scholars with distinct perspectives on decoloniality as theory, method, and political-ethical practice." - Thea N. Riofrancos, Cultural Dynamics
"I suspect most readers of The Extractive Zone (2017) will agree that Macarena Gómez-Barris has given us a book that merits and rewards close, intensive engagement. I find it exemplary in terms of the archive it builds, the methodological coordinates it plots, and its elegant braiding together of aesthetic practices and political realities. As someone working on climate change and aesthetics, I find most compelling Gómez-Barris’ argument that aesthetic experiences enact methods of thinking and doing." - Thomas S Davis, Cultural Dynamics
"Gómez-Barris’s compelling text grapples with the destruction and death dealt by extractive industries. . . . This is all provocative and engaging material, particularly when set against political economic critiques of extractivism." - Joe Bryan, The Americas
"Gómez-Barris’s writing provides an anecdote to technocratic visions of 'green capitalism' by foregrounding questions of justice, identity, and the contingency of politics. Scholars interested in the debates animating anti-extractive social movements in Latin America and beyond should begin here." - Matthew Shutzer, Enterprise & Society
"The Extractive Zone contributes an important feminist and indigenous hemispheric genealogy and cultural studies lens on current political economic debates circulating in Latin America and beyond regarding alternatives to growth-oriented, capitalist and extractive-based models of development. The book also complicates heroic and romantic readings of the conceptual and legal mechanisms surrounding the state-based rhetoric of buen vivir in Latin American constitutionalism that too often appear uncritically examined in scholarship produced in the global North." - Kristina Lyons, Journal of Latin American Studies
“Gómez-Barris’s focus is on movements, intellectuals, and artists who are working to create new worlds and alternative ways of being in the face of colonial domination and extractive capitalism. This is an ambitious vision rooted in feminist decolonial critique.” - Tom Perreault, Latin American Research Review
