Call for Papers: Dossier on Extractivism for 4.2 (Fall 2026)

From the late fifteenth-century to the late eighteenth-century, the Spanish and Portuguese Empires governed an enormous colonial enterprise that circulated people, animals, plants, manufactured goods and crafts, money, and knowledges on a global scale in what some have termed “the first globalization.” Its bureaucracies and outposts stretched to the Americas, the Italian peninsula, the Netherlands, the coasts of Africa and India, and the Philippines. However, Spain lost most of the territories it controlled in the period that spans from the Spanish American Revolutions (1808-1824) to the military rout of 1898, when it ceded Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines to the US. Portugal’s colonial history, on the other hand, was marked in the nineteenth-century by Brazil’s emergence as a site of imperial power in the wake of the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula.

What we now call “extractivism”— “the appropriation of resources, and their commercialization as raw materials” (Gudynas) —underwent a massive reconfiguration during this period. Historians have noted the “axial change” (Paquette) entailed by the displacement of metropolitan power from the Iberian centers of Lisbon-Cádiz-Madrid to London. This rapid shift was undergirded by the emergence of novel regimes of extraction. The republican revolutions of the period took shape within the emergence of modern nation-states, the end of isolationist practices, and the rise of economic liberalism. The extractive practices built upon mercantilism and the colonial bureaucracy of the Spanish Empire were replaced or supplemented by new forms of (neo)colonial dependency organized around the financial capitalist framework led by the London Stock Exchange. The expansion of print culture –including a notable proliferation of financial instruments such as paper money and stocks– as well as the introduction of technologies like the steamboat and the railroad altered deeply global networks of production, exchange, and consumption. From early on, intellectuals such as Andrés Bello reflected on this ideological and economic transformation in their works. Indeed, as Ericka Beckman, Richard Rosa, and others have shown, literary and visual cultures shaped and were shaped by these new modes of extraction.

This dossier seeks to further illuminate this moment in the history of global extractivism. It is motivated by the following questions: what can aesthetic form tell us about the profound transformations of extractivist practices that took place during the long nineteenth century (1789-1914)? How did genres and media such as the novel or photography enable, interrupt, or otherwise engage in the practices of extraction that were deployed in the Global South during this transformative period? What was the role of (post)colonial national bourgeoisies (Fanon) and other elite groups in the developmentalist debates that shaped markets and the public sphere? How did subaltern subjects respond from below to these novel efforts of dispossession and ecological threats?

We invite papers that critically investigate these questions from the perspective of literary, visual, and comparative studies in any area of the former Iberian Empires. We welcome conversations with other fields such as history, anthropology, ecology, economics, and decolonial studies. Papers that renew our historical and theoretical understanding of extractivism as a more-than-economic practice that involves aesthetic, epistemic, and ontological dimensions are particularly encouraged.

Contributors may consider:

• overlooked territorial connections of extractivist circulations;
• links of extractivism to nineteenth-century nationalisms and cosmopolitan imaginaries;
• written and visual cultures and their participation and/or questioning of extractivist practices and regimes;
• aesthetic forms and their engagement with cultural and industrial transformations;
• essays, pamphlets newspapers, and other textual or visual instances where these debates were performed;
• the entanglement of extractivism with modern financial institutions;
• the regimes of sovereignty of extractivism;
• forms of dispossession and oppression of indigenous and other minoritized or racialized populations;
• the category of extractivism in relation to kin concepts like primitive accumulation, exploitation, colonialism, and coloniality;
• imaginaries of commodities (gold, silver, guano, sugar, rubber, etc.);
• gendered and racialized articulations of extractive practices;
• the languages and practices of mining, deforestation, and/or other extractive industries;
• extractivism’s bureaucracy;
• the role of extractivism on military conflicts;
• debt and extractivism;
• geographic and cartographic imaginaries of extraction;
• reconfigurations of the nature-culture divide.
• echoes and comparisons with contemporary "returns" to 19th-Century geopolitical concepts: "the Monroe Doctrine"; gun-boat diplomacy; extractive (neo)colonialism...

We are seeking submissions of articles in either English, Spanish, or Portuguese, 8,000 to 10,000 words in length (word count will include the “works cited” section). They must be received by May 31, 2026, via email attachment (MSWord) to the guest editors or directly through the journal website (choose “section extractivism”). Attachments should be marked with the last name of the contributor, followed by the title/subject of the paper. Contributors need to adhere to the MLA Handbook, 9th edition, 2021. Visit style.mla.org for all questions regarding the formatting of your sources. The dossier is expected to be published in the Fall of 2026.

Periphērica is a blind peer-reviewed journal. All articles submitted to the journal are double-blind refereed to ensure academic integrity. For more information about the format, you can consult the “Authors guideline” section on the journal website.

You may write directly to the guest co-editors for this dossier, Cristina Carnemolla, Rafael Núñez Rodríguez, and Nicolás Sánchez Rodríguez, or to the General Editor:

• Cristina Carnemolla, McGill University, cristina.carnemolla@mcgill.ca
• Rafael Núñez Rodríguez, McGill University, rafael.nunez@mcgill.ca
• Nicolás Sánchez Rodríguez, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, nicsanchezro@unal.edu.co
• Pedro García-Caro, University of Oregon, pgcaro@uoregon.edu