The Political Ecology of Colonial Capitalism: Race, Nature, and Accumulation

Location Douglass Hall 221(Howard University) 2419 6th St NW, Washington, DC 20059
This event is co-sponsored by the Institute for Middle East Studies at George Washington University and Howard University and is funded by the U.S. Department of Education – Title VI.
In this public lecture Dr. Bikrum Gill of Virginia Tech will discuss his recently published book, The Political Ecology of Colonial Capitalism. Gill offers frameworks for understanding the structure of colonial capitalism and the struggle to achieve liberation from it. Gill’s “political ecology of colonial capitalism” explicates how capital accumulation has historically been premised upon a racialized denial of sovereignty to peoples located in the peripheries of the capitalist world system. The book explores the world scale co-production of race and the society/nature distinction as a foundational structure of capitalism. In so doing, this framework advances our understanding of the relationship between global political-economic inequality and the planetary scale of ecological crises. He highlights the “agrarian question of national liberation” – which aims to foreground the structural transformations necessary for colonized peoples to reclaim substantive sovereignty over their lands and labour. Underscoring the centrality of an armed peasant led revolutionary path that has alone proven capable of overturning colonial/imperial landed orders, he argues, is central to both the reclamation of substantive sovereignty and the overcoming of planetary scale ecological crises.
Speaker
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Dr. Bikrum Gill Dr. Bikrum Gill is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Science at Virginia Tech. Prior to coming to Virginia Tech, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Global Studies at the University of Victoria. He completed his PhD from York University in 2016. His dissertation, titled Race, Nature, and Accumulation: A Decolonial World-ecological Analysis of Land Grabbing, was nominated for the York University Dissertation Award. He is the author of “The Political Ecology of Colonial Capitalism: Race, Nature and Accumulation” (November 2024, Manchester University Press).