Critical Border Zones and Anti-extractive Thinking

Abstract

While the notion of the Anthropocene signals the urgency for a climate transition, it stops short of restructuring the anthropocentric principles of the dominant economic and societal model. Pluriversal decolonial designs being debated and practiced in Latin America treat the crisis of the current civilizational model as an opportunity to propose alternatives that seek to reconceptualize the ways in which we organize social life. This article brings to light nondualistic epistemologies and argues that the anti-extractivist designs needed for building regenerative futures go hand in hand with anti-colonial epistemic resistance. A central part of the analysis focuses on the Aymara-Bolivian thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, whose relational ontology allows us not only to confront the colonial legacy of the Anthropocene but also to acknowledge the global diffusion of coloniality. Through the Aymara linguistic concept of ch’ixi—a parallel coexistence of difference—Rivera Cusicanqui proposes new ways of building community beyond colonial dualisms and around socioecological knowledges.