The presentations in this panel delve not only in a wide range of geographical areas, but also in a variety of textual forms. Hence, the theoretical approaches that our panelists propose reflect the expansive and heterogeneous nature of the crisis caused by the global extractive practices. The critical approaches that will be discussed in this panel include: Michael Dowdy’s “Shakeout Poetics” (2020), Margaret Hillenbrand’s “Ragpicking as Method” (2019), and Pat Mahoney’s “Behold, The Horror Of Man: Dark Tourism In The Anthropocene” (2020). This scholarship not only helps our conceptualization of these pieces in depth, but also aids the expansion in our understanding of what extractivism means and our collective role in maintaining its hegemony, as described in Verónica Gago’s Feminist International (2020).

This session will feature three presentations each focusing on artistic productions from three different geographic and linguistic areas, both in the Global North and the Global South, to highlight the aesthetic, ethical and political stakes of the extractivist system and its influence. Victor Putinier, the respondent, will put the presentations into a conversation with one another through his introductory remark and through a series of questions addressed to all presenters to allow them to interact with one another’s research.

Olivia M. Lott will examine the exploitation of banana workers as explored in Paul Hlava Ceballo’s banana [ ]. The poetry collection, described by its author as a “collage of historical texts,” exposes the violence perpetrated by American industries onto Latin American workers and geography. Lott’s presentation will analyze the rewriting of this violent history performed by Hlava Ceballo as a counter-extractivist poetic project.

Yvonne Lin will focus on the figuration of waste in film and visual culture from post-1949 Taiwan, specifically in Hsing Lee’s Our Neighbor (1963) and Rienjian Magazine (1985-1989). Lin argues that both works form a genealogy of visual representation of ragpicking in Taiwan: the images of labor at the margins of Taiwan’s economic miracle portray home-making as an act of working with the superfluous, excessive, and discarded, thus shedding light on the mutual imbrication of environment and media on the front lines of the Cold War.

Rike Bolte will trace the history of the asbestos-laden 'white hell' that a French mine called Canari became for workers and residents: it was closed in 1965, but not cleared for demolition until 2023. If Canari could be considered a ‘terrain vague’ of the Anthropocene, that is, an aesthetically ‘effective’ terrain whose abandonment (and especially forgotten object: the industrial ruin), calls for a re-reading, revealing its toxic content and morbid emissions. Bolte will consider her own experience and reflect on why, when she rode close to the ruin of Canari on her bike in the late 1990s without knowing about it, she was overcome by a feeling that today, the mine has become a locus of ‘dark tourism’.

This panel offers a broad range of perspectives, as it features an independent scholar, an early-career professor and a graduate student, each of whom not only study different geographic and linguistic areas, but also do so from different institutional positionings not circumscribed to US American academia: Yvonne Lin currently resides in Taiwan for the purpose of field research, and Rike Bolte, independent scholar, currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany. It is important to mention that due to the comparative nature of this panel, the geographical representation will also extend to the objects studied and presented throughout our discussion.