A Handbook for Anticolonial Research

Abstract

A Handbook for Anticolonial Research Chaz Briscoe (bio) Max Liboiron. Pollution Is Colonialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 216 pp. $25.95 (pb). ISBN: 9781478014133. Max Liboiron’s Pollution is Colonialism is a field manual for engaging in intentionally anticolonial research. While the argument reorients your perspective on pollution, their project also concerns the colonial mechanisms of dominant scientific assumptions and methodological priorities. In that sense, Liboiron tracks how concepts such as assimilative capacity, universalism, fieldwork, and S-curves betray both an entitlement and differentiation that legitimizes colonial obligations within research. Concluding in their last chapter, Liboiron offers an alternative guide to practicing anticolonial scientific inquiry. I stress “inquiry” because the protocols the author offers can be employed by those in the humanities, social science, and natural sciences alike. It is this protocol of anticolonial practice that any theorist could use. We, as theorists, find ourselves engaging with topics, events, and issues connected to people, histories, and cultures. As political theorists, there is a need to be aware of the relations of power. Pollution is Colonialism provides a method of investigating every relationship for its specificity, accountability, and obligations—in other words, what power looks like in action. Chapters 1 and 2 disentangle and analyze the differences and impacts between Indigenous and dominant science, while Chapter 3 provides a method of anticolonial science based on compromise, obligation, community peer review, refusal, and generalizations. In the book’s conclusion, the anticolonial protocols offer a historical, contextual, and place-specific research approach. For theorists in a field that stresses empiricism, this orientation toward our work can help provide clarity and a model of the relations we theorize about. I appreciated that, in addition to the accessibility of the text, there was a quick and concise critique of capital, including such frames as scale, enclosure, and accumulation. These terms signal arguments made in environmental discourses about Black people. Though the text is based in Newfoundland and centers on Indigenous Studies and settler colonialism, I observe similar dynamics within the framework of racial capitalism. The analysis exemplifies resistance to capitalist modes of discourse and erasure. In contrast, some environmental discourses focus on conservation, which often fails to meet the ubiquity of environmental problems, especially in Black communities. Thus, Marxism as a method allows the reader to think through systemic relationships of extraction, as the text advocates, insisting on solutions that are on the scale of the environmental issue and honest about the primary polluters versus those who are the victims of primary pollution. Pollution is Colonialism soars in its ability to articulate fundamental contentions between Western science and anti-colonialism. In the text, Liboiron discusses the place of Indigenous knowledge systems within Western science. I [End Page 777] find dominant science distasteful, in particular, for its commitment to scientific universalism. Through discussing land relations and place-based research, Liboiron demonstrates the value of particularism. When I read the text, the broad applicability and resonance of its ability to speak to multiple fields, include a critique of capital, and advocate for place-based research excited me. The book challenges prior assumptions and emulates the stakes of environmental issues to force the reader to actively reckon with the author’s claim that dominant science legitimizes white supremacist settler-colonial knowledge production. This process allowed me to answer the question of how environmental discourses are shaped by capital (for example, Liboiron illustrates how ExxonMobil’s ad campaigns aided climate denial) and to understand how ecological pollution’s assumption of entitlement allows pollution to represent industrial property rights and supersede local, place-based individual rights. Often in my research on Cancer Alley, the 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that lines the Mississippi River with over 200 petrochemical plants and refineries, I have been puzzled by a similar question Liboiron offers in the text: what allowed society to make sense of these pollutants/toxicants in the first place? Liboiron provides a framework in Pollution is Colonialism to understand why discovery and conquest (and possession) are imperative to colonialism and science. The author relates how modes of science lead to mechanisms of extraction. Environmental science legitimizes assimilative capacities, reproducing logics of acceptable extraction/permissibility to...