Extractive subjectivity in a corporate coal mining site in Colombia

Abstract

This article contributes to the emerging scholarship on the formation of extractive subjectivities by exploring relations between a multinational coal-mining company and indigenous, Afro-Colombian and non-indigenous communities living in the surroundings of the mine, located in La Guajira department in northern Colombia. Building on long-term engagement in this region and a review of other comparable cases of subject-making in extractive spaces, the article presents a characterization of the complex subjectivity of 21st-century industrial extractivism. The overarching subjectivity of extraction has multiple (and sometimes conflicting) internal aspects whose appearances vary over time and space, sometimes overlapping simultaneously in the same person. The four major aspects of extractive subjectivity that I identify are refusal or resistance, or what I term risky resilience; hope, which builds on both desire and waiting; ambiguity and doubt; and deep emotions of anxiety and despair. The dimensions are in constant configuration in the encounter with corporate responses to people’s diverse ways of living and reacting to extractive power.