The renewed interest in extractivism in Latin America has opened up an intriguing set of possibilities, moving beyond its initial concern with the political economy of mining, oil, and gas to consider activities like soy agriculture, dams, and oil palm plantations. These issues are often grasped socially in terms of opposition and defense of land and livelihood. The text offers a welcome focus on creation generative of new understandings of capital and state. Gómez-Barris's compelling text grapples with the destruction and death dealt by extractive industries. The author stitches together efforts by the YASunidos coalition to counter the (neo)extractivism of the Correa government in Ecuador, new-age tourism in Peru, plantation forestry and hydropower development on Mapuche lands, hydropower on the upper Magdalena River in Colombia, and queer, anarcho-feminist critique in Bolivia encountered through protest, film, and text. Together the chapters form a constellation that the author charts as “the extractive zone.” The book's real achievement is to show that the extractive zone is a space occupied, examined, and reworked by its would-be subjects: indigenous peoples, black communities, queers, women, and children, to say nothing of fish, araucaria trees, birds, rivers, earth-beings, and rocks.

This is all provocative and engaging material, particularly when set against political economic critiques of extractivism. Using a “decolonial queer femme” analytic, the author grasps the extractive zone through its lived detail, where heterogeneity, fissures, and porousness appear. So it is that the YASunidos coalition challenging oil development takes shape through street protest and social media, linking indigenous peoples, artists, economists, and others. Francisco Huichaqueo fashions Wallmapu in film as a space striated by rows of plantation pine and dams, evictions, and death, in whose cracks a new form of Mapuche sociality is made through protest and dreams. Carolina Caycedo submerges viewers in the river, the narrative fading to subtitles beneath sounds of water moving, or plunging the camera into the river itself. Mujeres Creando queers political representation through new forms of sociality and space. The one outlier chapter is on new-age tourism in the Peruvian Andes, entered via a commodified Andean shamanism. Though the body is a key site for the author's “decolonial queer femme” encounters with the extractive zone, the chapter on tourism pushes it further as an instrument of ethnography, a zone shaped by shaman-laborers who try to both meet consumer demand and work on their bodies, attuning them to ways of seeing the world differently. Tourism is highly extractive, as the text suggests, though how it relates to other zones/chapters is harder to track.

Given that the text rightfully emphasizes the importance of how one thinks as well as where one thinks from, readers may be frustrated by the text's unevenness when it comes to attention to detail. The author does not account for how the cases for the chapters were chosen (or how they chose her). Rivers are misidentified in ways that will frustrate anyone familiar with individual cases and confuse those reading about them for the first time. So much emphasis is placed on the visual that other senses are lacking.

Yet, these gaps ought to be welcomed as invitations to engage with the author's emphasis on porosity and equivocation. Having spent time in locations discussed in four of the five chapters, my own memories of smell, touch, and sight accumulated in the text's gaps and silences, lingering long after putting the book down. The extractive zone is everywhere, sucking the life out of the land and labor that are the conditions of possibility for its existence. There is little to be gained by improving one's standing within this zone. Nor is there any going back. The text's engagement with practices of decolonization implies that all routes are fugitive, requiring the creation of emergent spaces through politics, aesthetics, and performance in the face of the extractive zone's threat of destruction and death.