Notes on “Capitalocene, Waste, Race and Gender” by Francoise Verges.
“As defined by geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore, capitalism is a global regime of vulnerability to death. The slave trade on which capitalism was built produced humans as waste and destroyed the cultural/natural world of indigenous peoples and of the continents colonized by European powers. The slave trade had a long-term effect on the African continent, its population, and its landscape, bringing filth, desolation, and death. The slave ship was a space of filth, feces, blood, and flesh rotted by the shackles of slavery. It was said that if peoples in the colonies noticed a foul stench drifting onto shore, they knew when a slave ship was coming.”
The production of vulnerability, precarity, without the safeguard of life, a vulnerable race, to provide comfort and wealth to the settler nation. Racism emerges through the necessity to inferiorise an exploited population for the comfort of the settler nation. Racism and white supremacy is also active in the foundations of these events of colonisation: to believe that the destruction of a population is worth the generated wealth.
“Race became a code for designing people and landscapes that could be wasted.” Codeification: thinking beyond essentialism of ‘biology’ through the feedback loops/hybridization, and resistance to, racisalisation.
“waste generated by Western imperialism or produced for the comfort and consumption of privileged white people ends up being dumped on racialized people, either at home in impoverished racialized neighborhoods, or in the countries of the Global South.” The word comfort is crucial, as comfort is not a need for life, or more life, but based in fear. Dramatic histories rooted in the pathetic fears of the white nation. Ursula Le Guinn’s “Earthsea” touches on the emotive fuels of our necrophiliac systems, the death drive. From the fear of death pulses a desire for control and domination.
“Racialization is created by white supremacy to make its world clean while destroying other worlds.” The fear of the end of the world is for those who already have a world, have owned world, identify historically with their world. Anna Tsing’s framework, for example, contradicts many white heterosexual academic’s collapse anxiety, suggesting that each life has their world, and assemblages of life meet in shared worlds. How do colonised populations, queers and other groups who have never had a “world”, or had right to the “world” feel towards the collapse dogma?
“The time for decolonial caring/cleaning (for reparation), for caring and cleaning what has been laid to waste in the past, clashes with the accelerated time of neoliberalism.” How to organise awarness for cleaning labour in this accelerated time.
“If the Anthropocene proclaims a sudden concern with the exposures of environmental harm to white liberal communities, it does so in the wake of histories in which these harms have been knowingly exported to black and brown communities under the rubric of civilization, progress, modernization and capitalism.” The white liberal communities are afraid because they cannot escape this catastrophe. The nonhuman agentive planet eventually has some neutralising factor. This way we could arrive at an anthropocene through collective despair, when electricity fades and stock is invalid. Perhaps some populations will be much more adapt at survival at this point. This idea of justice after collapse resonates’s with Halberstam’s “The Wild Beyond”, an essay prologue for Fred Moten’s Undercommons book. In this proposed necessity of destruction, how to you target the right people/systems without the rest?