Jackie Wang will present "The Deep Sea as the New Frontier of Accumulation."
Abstract: On April 25, 2025, President Donald Trump issued an executive order aimed at jump-starting the deep-sea mining industry by fast-tracking seabed mining permits in an effort to break China’s control over the critical minerals supply chain. Although the US is not a member of the International Seabed Authority (ISA)—the global body that governs the seabed in international waters—the US has forged ahead with their seabed mining plans in the name of national and economic security. Additionally, the “green energy” transition has launched a scramble for minerals such as lithium, cobalt, copper, and nickel, which are essential for electric vehicle batteries. This, along with the US-China conflict over rare earths, has catalyzed interest in deep-sea mining in the Pacific. Yet little is known about how the mining of polymetallic nodules on the seabed of the Pacific’s Clarion Clipperton Zone will affect delicate ocean ecosystems. Drawing on Marxist ecological thought, this lecture will examine the complex interplay between colonial history, indigenous politics, geoeconomics, and environmentalism in the context of deep-sea mining. I will explore the new modes of extraction that have ushered in what I call ‘oceanic primitive accumulation.’
Jackie Wang is a poet, scholar, multimedia artist, and Assistant Professor of Literary Arts at Brown University. She is the author of Carceral Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2018), the poetry collection The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us from the Void (Nightboat Books, 2021; National Book Award Finalist, Lambda Literary Award Finalist), the experimental essay collection Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun (Semiotext(e), 2023), and The Collected Graces (forthcoming from Nightboat Books). She is also the co-author, with the Precarity Lab, of Technoprecarious (Goldsmiths Press, 2020). She holds a PhD and MA in African and African American Studies from Harvard University and a BA in Liberal Arts from New College of Florida.