Introduction to Indigenous Performance Ecologies and Ecological Power in the Global South

Abstract

Human and non-human inhabitants in the global south are all gradually becoming refugees in their own local communities and the planet Earth. This is more visible in places in the extractive zone as Macarena Gomes-Barris refers to these locations, in Africa, Asia and Latin America, where multinational corporations and local extraction industries continue to cause harm to indigenous people, non-human lives, cultures and places. All these activities of extraction have accelerated the climate crisis and economic poverty. This has created unimaginable ways of living, such as the consumption of polluted water, breathing contaminated air, being bathed by black soot and so on. All these ways of living are prominent in the global south and especially countries of, in the words of Paul Collier (2007), the Bottom Billion. The Bottom Billion is the number of people living in countries “caught in one, or often several of four traps, amongst mismanaged dependency on natural resources” (p. 7). The extraction of natural resources which amounts to the exploitation of the environment and ecology of local people will continue to escalate with time. This has its evidence with the massive floods in Nigeria and Bangladesh, desertification in North Africa and India, and the Hurricane tragedies in Eastern Mexico. As Sally Mackey states in one of the Ted talks at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, titled: Keeping a Sense of Place in a Disrupted World, “the excess of energy use in the North is damaging countries in the South. Lands are diminishing, places are disappearing, 86 percent of global energy is gotten from fossil fuels. With this, lands will continue to diminish, places will disappear, and populations will move” (Mackey 2017).