Public Lecture: Racial capitalism in Canada. Lessons for the environmental justice movement?

Racial capitalism in Canada. Lessons for the environmental justice movement?

Drawing from his monograph in preparation, Interlocking Racisms: Multiple Colonialisms, Accumulated Violence, and Degrowth Plenitude, Sourayan Mookerjea interrogates the limits and possibilities of climate and environmental justice mobilization around the slogan of a green new deal in Canada. Despite this movement’s enthusiasm for the cultural politics of Indigenous Resurgence and its rhetorical support for decolonization, Indigenous land based sovereignty organizations keep themselves at a distance from its conventional statist political imaginary. Moreover, a northern-centred, climate emergency panicked imaginary seems to be losing popular momentum in a conjuncture marked by green passive revolution and fascism redux. This is taking place both nationally and transnationally while new formations of interlocking racisms enable the advance of class projects from above. Sourayan Mookerjea examines the crisis prone fault lines of this emergent conjuncture in Canadian society historically. He foregrounds the Canadian state’s articulation through interlocking neocolonial systems of oppression and argues for the importance of molecular social revolution against toxic cultures of empire now weaponized on replay.