Bioaccumulation: Chemical Geographies of Racial-Colonial Capitalism

Keywords: chemical geographies, racial capitalism, pesticides, political ecology, environmental racism, toxicity
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 57

Abstract

This paper engages with work on racial capitalism as a socio-environmental formations, developing a framework for understanding the productivity of chemicals beyond the analytic of unintended consequences. We offer the concept of bioaccumulation to articulate how toxicities manifest the environmental inequality of racial capitalism across scales, from the molecular to the macrostructural. In toxicology, bioaccumulation refers to the gradual buildup of chemicals in an organism over time. We extend this concept to examine how capital accumulates by shifting the burden of industrialization onto racialized peoples and ecologies. Following Pulido’s (2017) elaboration of environmental racism’s central role in racial capitalism, we focus here on pesticides to detail how chemical geographies are structured through modalities of racism and colonialism. Racism’s differential (de)valuation of life provides capitalism with a living infrastructure within which capitalist toxic “excesses” can be unevenly deposited. The analytic of bioaccumulation directs attention to the ways that so-called “externalities” of industrial capitalism are in fact central to the reproduction of racial-colonial capitalism, and calls for multi-scalar and relational accounts that challenge these uneven processes of (de)valuation.