Short abstract:

In this paper, I argue that to understand the extractive systems of trade routes, plantation management of plants, animals and peoples, the choice and regimes of agricultural crops through plant breeding and transgenesis betrays the racial logics of colonial biology.

Long abstract:

While ‘race’ is usually theorized within the sphere of the human and within Euro-American colonial imaginaries, race is in fact a foundational category in biology. In Linnaean biological classification, race spans human and non-human worlds. The Linnaean imagination categorized all living things into a colonial imagination where all species and races’ had their place in the natural order.

This paper explores how ‘race’ and racial logics traverse biology through categories such as species, genera, and varieties. What undergird the logics of biological nomenclature are extractive regimes of colonialism. The project of colonialism and its efforts to efficiently extract resources from the colonies spawned a colonial biology that named, categorized species in order to subsequently enlist and exploit them in regimes of colonial extraction. In a hierarchy of racial logics, some humans were considered superior to others, and some species to others. This paper contends that biological theories remain haunted by the legacies and logics of race that is fundamentally colonial and extractive. Such racial extractive logics span colonial regimes of human, animal and plant biologies. In this paper I argue that to understand the extractive systems of trade routes, plantation management of plants, animals and peoples, the choice and regimes of agricultural crops through plant breeding and transgenesis betrays the racial logics of colonial biology. I explore how these logics endure into modern day industrial neocolonial agriculture and the modern biological imagination.