The rise of flexible extraction: Boom-chasing and subject-making in northern Madagascar

Abstract

Since 1990, northern Madagascar has been overwhelmed by successive and overlapping resource booms and busts. Erratic commodity markets—including those for gold, sapphires, vanilla, and rosewood—have sent rural Malagasy residents moving back and forth between various forms of extraction and production with unprecedented volatility. This article explores the history and lives of northern Madagascar’s makeshift miners-turned-loggers-turned-cash-croppers in order to rethink small-scale resource extraction in a highly speculative, late-capitalist global economy. Resource workers in the region, we argue, have transformed from migrants who view extractive activities as temporary complements to subsistence agriculture to mobile subjects chasing one resource boom after another, often abandoning stable agrarian aspirations altogether. Although originating in the cosmopolitan global North, late-capitalist economic volatility nonetheless shapes extractive subjectivities in the global South, contributing to more flexible extraction and livelihoods. Flexible extractive subjects in northern Madagascar, we conclude, provide a rural parallel to the late-capitalist subjects of the global North. They represent a growing class of flexible labor in the global South that bears notable resemblance to the gig economy workers currently dominating discussions of precarious work in the twenty-first century.