Intimate extraction: Geological matter, extractive afterlives, and the denial of a Black sense of place in Southern Louisiana

Abstract

This paper centres geological matter in questions of marginality, inequality, and structural racism in the US. I follow the entanglements of geological matter with bodies, emotion-laden imaginaries of place, and histories of slavery and colonialism, to illustrate how contemporary Black lives are intimately connected to processes of mineral extraction. Drawing on Saidiya Hartman's concept of ‘afterlives’, I situate heightened levels of ambient toxicity from geological refinement and industrial waste as extractive afterlives, connecting commonly felt precarity around extractive worlds to broader questions of race, inequality, and connections to place. Citing academic and artistic accounts of life in Southern Louisiana, a historically Black region with a large petrochemical industry, I demonstrate the relevance of geological entanglements to experiences of structural racism in the US.