Environmental Legacies and Epistemic Reparations in the Afterlives of Colonial Extraction

Laing Ebbensgaard, Casper, Holden, Kerry and Yusoff, Kathryn (2026) Environmental Legacies and Epistemic Reparations in the Afterlives of Colonial Extraction. South Atlantic Quarterly, 125 (3). pp. 60-628. ISSN 1527-8026

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Abstract

This article develops the portal as a spatial theory that fosters chrono-geographic vigilance toward the erasure of earth relations in the making of a decolonial subject of rights. Drawing on archival research in the UK and South Africa, it reconstructs a geo-social history that links slum housing in east London and diamond mining in South Africa to contemporary data mining and manipulation through AI. Responding to the theme of inhuman reparations, the article asks, What reparations are needed to repair the severance of environmentally displaced lives that cannot land? The article responds with a discussion of a series of artworks from the exhibition I am in your dreams, but you are not in mine (2025), which attends to the silences and erasures of environmental harms while offering alternative ways of inhabiting the decimated environments of extraction. The artworks develop speculative nonfictions to account for a full life of subjects, bodies, and earths taking place within and against the long shadows of colonialism. Against the severing tides that cut the environmental ties to bodies in extractive economies, these speculative nonfictions encourage a form of inhuman jurisprudence that recognizes the historical legacies that tie human subjects to wider ecologies.

Item Type:	Article
Uncontrolled Keywords:	epistemic repair,inhuman,reparations,photography,ai archive,das to be completed,2026 ,/dt/atira/pure/keyword/DAStatement/das_to_be_completed
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Science > School of Environmental Sciences
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Environmental Social Sciences Faculty of Science > Research Groups > Science, Society and Sustainability
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	10 Nov 2026 16:07
Last Modified:	12 Nov 2026 00:02
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/105046
DOI:	10.1215/00382876-12477749

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