This short essay is part of an Interrogations book forum on Claire Blencowe's Spirits of Extraction: Christianity, Settler Colonialism and the Geology of Race (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2025)
Walking in the streets of East Bristol - my neighbourhood and also Claire Blencowe’s - I now look differently at the rows of terraced Victorian houses built for coal miners. I now connect the very walls of my home to histories of violence that unfolded here and across other continents. I already knew of Bristol’s role as a major port in the slave trade, a city whose wealth was built on death and exploitation, but I had yet to trace the material making of my own home with a broader British and global history of colonialism, extraction, religionand violence. Reading Spirits of extraction shifted this perspective. It made me reconsider a memory from a few years ago, when I stripped the walls of my fireplace in my Bristolian Victorian house to find coal dust. It placed me and the material I inhaled then, into a geographical and historical web linking me to Cornish miners, migrants, methodists and colonisers, and Indigenous children who died in Canadian residential schools. I now look back critically at the first time I entered John Wesley’s’ New room, the oldest methodist building, for a concert in Bristol. A friend enthusiastically shared with me elements of British history ‘John Wesley, the founder of methodism, famous abolitionist, he did a lot for Bristoland Britain’, she said. On reflection, it is striking to realise the things we believe true when we just do not know.
This work of placing, situating, tracing, digging, connecting two concepts that seem unrelated - extraction and religion - across three a priori disconnected sites, is what drives ClaireBlencowe’s investigation. Spirits of extraction draws on the kind of research that deeply unsettles one’s place in the world, and challenges conventional truths by unpacking the making of our global history of violence. In what follows, I reflect on two particularly inspiring threads amongst many in Blencowe’s work, before ending with a series of open questions to invite further work on the colonial histories of extraction.
The first element that struck me in this work, is the political location of Claire Blencowe and the book itself, grounded in a feminist, postcolonial and decolonial ethos beyond the subject matter. The author does not only acknowledge positionality as an academic gesture but carefully practices ‘a politics of enunciation’. She starts with Bristol, where she lives, and the toppling of the Colston statue in the harbour to then trace the history of the slave trade, unpacking the widespread assumption that the methodist John Wesley was straightforwardly an abolitionist figure. As such, she grounds this history not only in place, but in her own embodied trajectory. She becomes the mediator who links Bristol to Cornwall, where she is from, and to her own ancestry’s embeddedness in the British history of mining and methodism. By doing this, she challenges ideas of methodism as inherently opposed to racial hierarchies. Rather, she reveals the role of methodist salvationist frameworks in producing racialised hierarchies with Cornish miners becoming ‘primitive’ subjects to be saved and educated. She shows how this religious morality also shaped education system driven by salvation and a civilising mission.
Rather than ‘following the thing’, Blencowe, in a sense, ‘follows the methodist’ through Britain and across continents, and through the British colonial history. In chapter 2, she explores how Cornish migrants are made ‘black’ by methodists within Britain. She, however, also shows how Cornish migrants sought social mobility. As pioneers on colonial lands, they ‘whitened’, justifying the colonial exploitation, extraction and killing of Indigenous peoples and land through religious morality, and hence reinscribing racial hierarchies they themselves were once victims of on territories and peoples seen as uncivilized and primitive. Chapter 3 then takes us then to Canada upper Ontario Indigenous land, and in particular residential schools set up by methodists and migrants, in lands of extraction. Although she does not explicitly name it, Bencowe’s methodological approach strongly resonates with the feminist geographer Cindi Kat’z concept of countertopography (2001). In particular, the author successfully traces the contours of common processes across disparate places within ‘extractive bodies’ (Postar and Behzadi, 2022) – bodies of the miners and those living in colonial lands of extraction who are deeply and intimately shaped by the violence of colonial and extractive forces.
The second exceptional contribution of Blencowe’s work lies in the way her theorizations expand the concept of geology of race (Yussof, 2018), challenging some of its more universalist tendencies. The author embeds the concept developed by the geographer Kathryn Yussof in a traceable historical process documented through deep archival and empirical research. In doing so, she contributes to decolonising this framework, which is sometimes articulated in abstraction or theoretical isolation. This grounding also allows Blencowe to add dynamism to the concept and develop the idea of a Metaphysics of race. I particularly appreciated the author’s engagement with race as not fixed, but plural and transformative across space. Cornish miners blackened in one place, are whitened through migration and colonial extraction. This transformation is also spiritual. Blencowe shows how methodist metaphors framed mining itself as a descent into darkness and proximity to the demonic, followed by emergence into salvation and light. Race, extraction, and religion are thus intertwined through experiences of depth, dangerous labour, and redemption. This is a deeply geographical and fluid conceptualisation which pushes the boundaries of the concept of geology of race to make it palpable, and valuable.
Many questions remain open and suggest rich avenues to future work building on concepts developed by Claire Blencowe. One concerns the potential risk of minimising the specific forms of violence experienced by Black bodies by focusing on racialisation and blackening of white subjects. While the author treats this subject tactfully, I would advise future work to exercise a similar level of caution. The book engagement with ‘bodies’ is also compelling but prompts further reflection on embodied experiences of miners themselves. Blencowe frames her discussion of extractive bodies through biopolitics and spiritual transformation, leaving room for further exploration which addresses more directly embodied experiences and memoirs of miners and methodists or other colonisers themselves. Finally, by tracing this specific history, Blencowe invites us to think about its applicability to other colonial and religious - or perhaps simply ideological - contexts. How might the relationship between methodism, British colonialism, and extraction, compare for instance, with Catholic practices tied to extraction during Latin America’s colonial period? Or, turning to a context I know better, could we apply the concept of ‘metaphysics of race’ to Soviet colonialism and its specific modes of modernist extraction, examining how the anti-religious civilizing mission of an ideological rather than explicitly religious empire operated in similar ways? There is clearly much to explore, and Blencowe’s opens an important field of research which I am hoping will continue to grow.
References
Katz, C. (2001) ‘On the grounds of globalization: a topography for feminist political engagement’, Signs, 26(4), pp. 1213–1234.
Postar, S. and Behzadi, N.E. (2024) ‘“Extractive bodies”: a feminist counter-topography of two extractive landscapes’, Geoforum, 148, 103628. doi: 10.1016/j.geoforum.2022.09.005.
Yusoff, K. (2018) A Billion Black Anthropocenes or none. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
How to cite this article: Behzadi, Negar Elodie (2026), "Tracing histories of Extractive Violence," Interrogations, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18714682.
