This issue of the NACLA Report brings together scholars, activists, and artists who are not only committed to documenting the catastrophe of racial capitalism, a term coined by political theorist Cedric Robinson, but also to investigating how racialism is bound to histories of “resource colonialism” (as Nick Estes puts it in this issue), mass criminalization, environmental plunder, and orchestrated tactics of erasure and dispossession. The contributors see these processes as interlinked, as are the movements and forms of life that have arisen in defiance of this death system. This issue centers the devastation and racialized effects of global capitalism, while also shedding light on the ongoing struggles of Black and Indigenous peoples for freedom, autonomy, and life.
This NACLA Report addresses a number of key themes that cut across the region, including how Black and Indigenous lands are rendered empty, or up for grabs, and how the capitalist system, predicated on the extraction of land and labor, colludes in the annihilation of life. The pillage of Indigenous and Black territories, carried out in the name of sustaining endless economic growth, has produced profound inequities and irreparable ecological destruction. Moreover, the turn to sustainable or “green” development, intended to abate raging environmental crises, such as severe drought, mega-storms, and energy meltdowns, are woefully inadequate. The contributors in this issue shed light on these processes, while also asking: how might we reimagine our shared future?
Read the full editor's introduction.
