Colonization was thus not merely a process of establishing dominion over human beings; it was also a process of subjugating, and reducing to muteness, an entire universe of beings that was once thought of as having agency, powers of communication, and the ability to make meaning—animals, trees, volcanoes, nutmegs. These mutings were essential to processes of economic extraction—because, as the philosopher Akeel Bilgrami observes, in order to see something as a mere resource, “we first need to see it as brute, as something that makes no normative demands of practical and moral engagement with
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