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An investigation into one of the largest and most lucrative mineral mining companies in the world, Rio Tinto, Extraction Politics reveals how the company constructs a presence in the places it operates and shapes meanings and orientations toward the environment.
Taking readers on a "rhetorical pilgrimage" across the American Southwest, Nicholas Paliewicz shows how Rio Tinto creates adaptable corporate identities. From Ronald Reagan's frontiersman advertisements for the Borax Mine in California to the pioneer Mormon persona at Bingham Canyon Mine in Salt Lake City and the folksy, paternalistic perspective toward the San Carlos Apache at the proposed mine at Oak Flat, Arizona, the company appropriates local history to embed itself as a valued member of the public – without having to settle in those ecological communities and bear the costs of extraction. This does not occur without resistance, however. Paliewicz also shows how activists use these same tactics to expose Rio Tinto as an exploitative, colonialist polluter.
In an era of surging demand for dwindling supplies of minerals and metals, this book previews what the future of extractivism may look like. Extraction Politics will appeal to scholars and students of environmental communication and activist politics as well as general readers interested in the climate crisis.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Corporation That Therefore I Am
1. The Corporate Persona
2. Historical Extractivism at the Borax Mine
3. Experiencing Copper: Touring Rio Tinto Kennecott and the Bingham Canyon Mine
4. Extractive Coloniality at Oak Flat
5. Essentializing Rio Tinto’s Corporate Persona
Conclusion: Reflections on Becoming-Incorporated, Public Screens, and Strategic Essentialism
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Nicholas Paliewicz is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Louisville. He is the coauthor of Racial Terrorism; Memory and Monument Wars in American Cities; and The Securitization of Memorial Space.
"In this insightful book, Nicholas Paliewicz encounters the horrifying aftermath of colonial and ecological violence, uncovers the resources that Rio Tinto uses to alchemically generate a shifting – and shifty – set of corporate personae, and visits scenes of Indigenous and environmentalist resistance. Extraction Politics is at once a damning critique of extractive corporate rhetoric, a careful celebration of grassroots resistance, and a clarion call to stay with the trouble of entangled, impure earthly coexistence."
– Joshua Trey Barnett, author of Mourning in the Anthropocene
"This book makes an important connection between recent scholarship on ecological and new materialist rhetorics and the ongoing work of understanding corporations as powerful rhetorical actors. At a time when these institutions garner more and more power and resources, Paliewicz has done the hard work of locating corporate rhetoric as a shared, entangled process spread across multiple sites. For anyone interested in corporate rhetoric, or the rhetorics that shape economies generally, this is essential reading."
– Timothy Johnson, author of Rhetoric, Inc.: Ford's Filmmaking and the Rise of Corporatism
