[Geogwaste] CFP: Sacrifice Zones: a Critical Geography

[Perkins, Harold]

** Apologies for Cross-Posting **


Sacrifice Zones: a Critical Geography

Call for Contributors to an Edited Volume [i]
Co-Editors: Alec Brownlow (DePaul University) and Harold Perkins (Ohio University)

The expression, Sacrifice Zone, stems from the Cold War and was used by government and military officials in the U.S. to describe those territories (e.g., stretches of the American west, Bikini atoll, etc.) forever alienated in the wake of nuclear testing and production. As crafted and deployed at the time, the expression, National Sacrifice Zone, was packed with the patriotic symbolism and moral justification believed necessary to win public support for such vast devastation; geographies (regions, landscapes, and ecosystems) whose sacrifice (i.e., annihilation) were necessary, if awful, costs in the name of democracy, freedom, and "the American way." More recently, the expression is being applied in like manner to those regions of macroscale resource extraction (e.g., coal extraction by mountain top removal in Appalachia) whose sacrifice (i.e., social, cultural, and environmental devastation), according to the dominant ideological narrative, are necessary, if awful, costs in the name of U.S. industrial competitiveness, rural jobs, and energy independence - the latter made all the more intense by a post 9-11 xenophobic populism directed at oil producing countries in the Middle East and North Africa.

In and of itself, and as the above examples suggest, as historically contrived the sacrifice zone is a political and economic device whose viability and justifying power are dependent upon and enabled by a geo-political bogeyman (Communism, Islam, etc.) whose very existence is constructed into a public threat (real or otherwise) that empowers, gives moral authority to, and foments public approval of those political institutions (e.g., Department of Defense, Department of Energy, etc.) and their industrial affiliates (e.g., Lockheed-Martin, Raytheon, Big Coal, Big Oil, etc.) capable of ecological and social devastation on a massive scale.  At the same time, the sacrifice zone is part and parcel to an imperialist agenda of economic, political, and cultural hegemony - one that is tolerant of, if tested by, the administration of state-approved violence towards its own population, landscapes, and resources.

Writing in the early 90s, Mike Davis was among the first to dig beyond the patriotic rhetoric and expose the racist (Native American peoples and lands were disproportionately poisoned) and cancerous legacy behind the National Sacrifice Zone policy and discourse in the post-Cold War American west.[ii] Since then, several scholars have revisited and recast the sacrifice zone concept as the systemic policy and spatial pattern of environmental injustice, whereby minority populations, communities, and landscapes are disproportionately contaminated (or sacrificed) in the name of capitalist accumulation.[iii] Most recently, journalists Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco have considerably broadened the concept, both geographically and topically, to encompass without geographic or demographic restrictions "those areas in the country that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement."[iv]

As co-editors of the proposed volume, we are compelled by the possibilities for application and critical geographical inquiry that this latter definition of the term infers. All the while acknowledging the history and utility of the sacrifice zone in normative and critical discourse, it is our intention in this volume to broaden the concept beyond its spectacular and regional origins so as to identify and emphasize the myriad, more obscure and mundane geographies of sacrifice whose "loss" (destruction, victimization, exploitation, etc.), though perhaps less spectacular, is no less contrived as "necessary", "appropriate", and "justified" in the name of ideological expansion. Specifically, we aim in this volume to 'open up' the sacrifice zone concept and its critique to include a multi-scalar and international analysis of those geographies (to include, inter alia: bodies, social groups, populations, communities, neighborhoods, cities, landscapes, regions, and socio-ecological systems) identified as expendable (i.e., available for sacrifice) in the name of economic, political, and/or technological hegemony. Insofar as we believe that sacrifice has likely acquired more nuanced expression and application in this neoliberal age of expanding austerity and social disinvestment, we are especially keen to identify and uncover examples of those places and spaces that, in essence, constitute the 'new' geographies of sacrifice?

The purpose of proposed volume is manifold:

*         to explore in more detail, using a wide variety of case studies, the idea and the suitability of sacrifice to critical geographical thinking and scholarship;

*         to explore the many institutions, faces, and facets of sacrifice as it unfolds, and has unfolded, in different places and at different spatial scales;

*         to situate the sacrifice zone concept within an appropriate theoretical landscape (e.g., Agamben's 'bare life', Foucault's 'biopolitics', Mbembe's 'necropolitics', etc.) and begin the process of developing an identifiable and critical theory of sacrifice in geography;

*         to explore sacrifice as a central tenet (material and discursive) of neoliberalism and globalization.

The goal is to develop a critical geography of the sacrifice zone expression and its application, one that is more nuanced, more geographically explicit and explanatory, and more theoretically robust than has heretofore been developed in the social sciences.

To this end, this call for submissions casts a wide net, both thematically and discursively, inviting for consideration those contributions that directly speak to or are informed by the concept of sacrifice in field research (case studies) and explanation/interpretation (theory-building).

Interested contributors should send a 500 word abstract and updated CV to Alec Brownlow (cbrownlo at depaul.edu<mailto:cbrownlo at depaul.edu>) and Harold Perkins (perkinsh at ohio.edu<mailto:perkinsh at ohio.edu>) by August 9th, 2013. Serious inquiries only please.


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[i] The book prospectus is being developed for, and was solicited by, a major University Press.

[ii] Davis, Mike. 1993. Dead West: Ecocide in Marlboro Country. New Left Review, July-August (200): 49-73.

[iii] For example: Bullard, R. 1993. The threat of environmental racism. Natural Resources & Environment, Winter: 23-26, 55. Hooks, G. and C. Smith. 2004. The treadmill of destruction: National Sacrifice Areas and Native Americans. American Sociological Review 69:558-575; Lerner, S. 2010. Sacrifice Zones: the frontlines of toxic chemical exposure in the United States. MIT: Cambridge.

[iv] Hedges, C. and J. Sacco. 2012. Days of destruction, days of revolt. Nation Books: New York. (quote from page XI)