Abstract
Responding to calls for increased attention to actions and reactions “from above” within the extractive industry, we offer a decolonial critique of the ways in which corporate entities and multinational institutions draw on racialized rhetoric of “local” suffering, “local” consultation, and “local” culpability in oil as development. Such rhetoric functions to legitimize extractive intervention within a set of practices that we call localwashing. Drawing from a decade of research on and along the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline, we show how multiscalar actors converged to assert knowledge of, responsibility for, and collaborations with “local” people within a racialized politics of scale. These corporate representations of the racialized “local” are coded through long-standing colonial tropes. We identify three interrelated and overlapping flexian elite rhetoric(s) and practices of racialized localwashing: (1) anguishing, (2) arrogating, and (3) admonishing. These elite representations of a racialized “local” reveal diversionary efforts “from above” to manage public opinion, displace blame for project failures, and domesticate dissent in a context of persistent scrutiny and criticism from international and regional advocates and activists. Key Words: coloniality, decolonial, elite, extraction, racism.
Highlights
ÃSchool of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford †Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience, Coventry University
We examine some of the key political contestations and elite rhetoric that legitimized the Chad–Cameroon Oil Pipeline as an oil as development project, both in the face of considerable antiextractive critique and, later, in the face of the project’s persistent failures
Our recognition of the ongoing coloniality of knowledge demands that we remain vigilant about the ways in which our work risks replicating various aspects of coloniality; we make humble and yet-unfinished efforts to attend to decolonial options
Summary
Racialization, and racism are coconstitutive of what cultural theorists and sociologists Bacchetta, Maira, and Winant (2019, 3) called “global raciality” within coloniality Racialization refers to those material processes and rhetorical practices characterized by systematic refusals to recognize the equal humanity of nonwhite people (e.g., othering). Flexian elite often maintain corporate legitimacies through strategic deflections of blame and postracial refusals This includes the absolution of racism through the insistence that racist actions and racial inequalities are problems located at the scale of the individual and resolved by the superficial inclusion of racialized bodies within extractive projects. The last three decades, we argue, have witnessed assorted efforts by flexian elites to incorporate local peoples and knowledges within a colonial rhetoric of corporate extraction We refer to these broad practices within colonial extraction as racialized localwashing. Our recognition of the ongoing coloniality of knowledge demands that we remain vigilant about the ways in which our work risks replicating various aspects of coloniality; we make humble and yet-unfinished efforts to attend to decolonial options
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