Race in the Metabolic Rift: The Metaphor and Materiality of Whiteness

Abstract

If metabolic rifts are ruptures, chasms, or divisions, what happens inside them? Shifting attention from multi-scalar socio-ecological and corporeal metabolisms towards the internal dynamics of rupture, this paper returns to the origins of metabolic thought to see what happens at the bottom of these clefts within nature. The progenitor of metabolic thought in Marx and Engels was the German natural scientist Justus von Liebig. This paper explores Liebig's meat extraction factories in South America to bring to light an archetypical metabolic rift. Yet while soil nutrients, animal life, human labour, and landscapes are wasted, destroyed, displaced, and ruptured, what is made in the rift? I explore the material and metaphorical dimensions of the metabolic rift to analyse the interior worlds and socio-natural effects of this chasm in which new connections emerge between race and socio-ecological extraction.