Considering the Convention’s theme of ‘Working Conditions’ this collaborative panel examines early modern/colonial literary, ethical, ecological reflections on the European capitalist violent expansion in search of ‘cheap’ nature and labor inaugurating the capitalocene era and emerging notions of nature and the human. Conceptually, following Jason Moore’s Capitalism and the Web of Life, the panel examines the colonial framework causing ecological degradation, revising the traditional narrative in ecocritical studies that views the industrial revolution as its main cause. Furthermore, the panel goes beyond the concept of the antropocene to account for the human impact on the environment because such concept blames all of humanity causing environmental damage, where in fact there are historical predatory practices of certain groups towards particular groups of humans and nature that account for the enslavement, dispossession, exploitation of peoples and regions—namely European colonialism and imperialism from the 1500s onward. We also consider the necropolitical practices for the management of the life and death of certain populations as conceptualized by Achille Membe in Necropolitcs.

The panel consist of four presentations covering the Spanish and Francophone Caribbean, Mexico and Peru from the 16^th to the 18^th Century:

First, Paola Uparela focuses on numerous observations and descriptions that Christopher Columbus made about the bodies and genitalia of Indigenous women. His interest is fundamentally commercial: Columbus participated in the first trafficking activities of American girls and women. In the logbook, Columbus comments that the girls were always naked, unlike the married women, who generally wore a sheet, a cotton cloth, or a pair of pants that covered their “nature,” that is, their vulvas. This “nature” appears in the Columbian text between references to gold, other extractable and marketable products, and fertile lands (“very green and flat and very fertile island”).

Next, Daniel Nemser explores a debate over the construction of a new leg of the camino real (royal road) in colonial Mexico at the end of the sixteenth century in order to propose a theory of infrastructure in the Capitalocene. For Jason W. Moore, the rise of capitalism in the long sixteenth century is made possible by new practices of environment-making, both material and epistemic or cultural. Although it does not receive sustained attention in Moore’s work, infrastructure sits at the intersection of these two dimensions, remaking the world in order to facilitate ongoing accumulation. In this specific case, the debate over the road revolves around the feasability of the project with regard to the use of indigenous labor to build and maintain it. What comes through clearly in these archives is the process by which “nature” is mobilized in the service of imperial circulation, while certain fractions of humanity are simultaneously consigned to the category of “nature.”

In the third presentation, Crystal Chemris examines the Spanish Baroque poet Luis de Góngora critique of Spain’s imperial ventures in his long lyric poem, the Soledades, expressing aspects of the economic and social reform program of his mentor, Pedro de Valencia. Gongora's view is contrasted with Inca Garcilaso's critique of the human cost of mining in his Comentarios Reales.

In the fourth presentation, Isabel Bradley centers on the Caribbean cradle of the capitalocene, turning to conflicting notions of human and nature birthed from the plantations of colonial Martinique and Saint-Domingue. In an era where the reduction of the earth and human beings to dead matter, or “matière Nègre” (Ferdinand 2020), generated enormous profit for colonial metropoles, this paper will explore the refusal of colonial taxonomies of race and nature allowed by subsistence cultivation.