‘Pinos, pinos, pinos. Eucaliptos, eucaliptos, eucaliptos’: the refrain of a Mapuche elder in Francisco Huichaqueo's film Mencer: Ñi Pewma (2011), to describe the haunting homogenization of life and landscapes by the plantation forests that have come to occupy southern Wallmapu territories in what is now called Chile. The refrain is accompanied by the provocative image of a slow-burning fire or quemada that is a Mapuche strategy for reoccupying ancestral land dispossessed by the present-day violence of commercial monoculture forestry. In The Extractive Zone, Macarena Gómez-Barris focuses on the dominant political, economic and ecological struggles over the protracted history and neo-extractive capitalist rationales that continue to characterise South American development models. Building on genealogies of critical theory from the global South, including dependency theory and decolonial theories and praxis, the book engages with what the author calls ‘Andean phenomenology’ and the intersectionality of indigenous queer-anarcho-feminist critique to perform a cultural studies analysis of the life-worlds that are both under siege and attempt to resist extractivism. The book is situated in five specific spatial geographies in South America – the Bío Bío region of Chile, the Sacred Valley in Peru, Potosí and La Paz in Bolivia, eastern Ecuador and southwestern Colombia. Gómez-Barris engages with the work of Mapuche filmmaker Francisco Huichaqueo and Colombian mestiza visual artist Carolina Caycedo, as well as with the political organisational experiences and manifestos of Mujeres Creando (‘Women Creating’) collectives in La Paz, the alternative imaginings of Quichua communities within the Yasuní region of Ecuador and ‘Andean phenomenologies’ that counter rural gentrification and the impacts of spiritual tourism in the highlands of Peru. Gómez-Barris follows life forms or worlds that she conceptualises as the ‘submerged perspectives’ within and that move beyond what are labelled ‘extractive zones’.

A question that guides her project is: ‘what cultural and intellectual production makes us see, hear, and intimate the land differently?’ (p. xx). She takes inspiration from artists and cultural productions that provide methodologies for what she refers to as the cultivation of ‘countervisualities’ and sensorial and embodied immersions in the layered terrain of potentiality that inhabit the socio-ecological destruction produced by extractive industries, and their coupling with deeper and ongoing colonial wounds. With a focus on decolonial aesthetics, the book aspires to demonstrate how renewed perception and ‘epistemological excess’ offers methods for decolonial study and praxis or the task of perceiving life otherwise that Gómez-Barris terms a ‘decolonial queer femme method’ (p. 14). By epistemic excess, the author refers to an interdisciplinary weaving of standpoint and decolonial theory, regional histories and relational critique that facilitates her tracing of political, aesthetic and performative practices.

The book asks the provocative question as to whether experimental film can suggest what the land remembers (p. 69). It stays attuned to experimental techniques that pose challenges to colonial modes of representation or what the author refers to as the flattening ‘extractive view’ of diverse life-worlds and territories. One such example is the ‘fish-eye episteme’ in Caycedo's film Yuma: Land of Friends (2014), which provides an underwater perspective that delves into the muck of what has usually been rendered in linear and transparent visualities propelling the commodification of water.

The Extractive Zone contributes an important feminist and indigenous hemispheric genealogy and cultural studies lens on current political economic debates circulating in Latin America and beyond regarding alternatives to growth-oriented, capitalist and extractive-based models of development. The book also complicates heroic and romantic readings of the conceptual and legal mechanisms surrounding the state-based rhetoric of buen vivir in Latin American constitutionalism that too often appear uncritically examined in scholarship produced in the global North.