Presentation short abstract

This presentation scrutinizes the renewed sacrificial tendencies in Swedish green industry representations, reinscribing indigenous Sápmi as a site of extraction. I show how these projects summon fantasies of future happiness through the opportunity envisioned in the beauty of the exploitable.

Presentation long abstract

Sweden prides itself on its mining tradition, contributions to European self-sufficiency and, more recently, its crtitical mineral deposits and leadership in the decarbonization of the steel industry. Meanwhile, destructive impacts on land and biodiversity are largely overlooked. Drawing on the literature on extractivism, emotional political econology and a psychoanalytical conceptual framing I analyse “green” investments’ continued inscription of indigenous Sápmi as extractable, invoking through traditional colonial tropes that place specific effort on the beauty of the sacrificed land. I do this more specifically by analyzing narratives and visual representations produced by mining, “green” steel and low carbon energy actors legitimizing the expansion of their presence in Sápmi in the context of the Swedish industrial green transition. I explore the continued orientation toward extraction in green transitions, which continue to require spaces of sacrifice, as driven by a fantasmatic promise of happiness in the future. I contribute with a reading of these sacrificial tendencies in Sápmi as driven by a colonial allure for the land, which I read as an affective endeavor, an attraction to the land and the potential it is envisioned holding. I find that they not only reproduce colonial mindsets of emptiness and oportunity, but that they do so by capitalizing on the allure of the land’s beauty, referencing lush nature as a desirable trait to legitimize extraction for the greened colonial project. With this reading, I explore the emotional components of extractive sacrifice and scrutinize the common industry framing of extraction as rational and unemotional.