Denaturalisation and Modernity: Drugs and Racial Capitalism

From the earliest days of European colonialism in the Americas and transatlantic slavery, psychoactive drugs, racial inequality, and the global political economic order have had intertwined histories. Particularly attentive to sugarcane—used to produce cachaça and rum--as well as coca, cocaine, tobacco and opium, we argue that the intensive production of and transnational trade in increasingly potent psychoactive substances fueled the historical rise of racial capitalism and has remained vital to the ongoing re/production of the unjust global order. The ascendance of drugs as commodities has been co-constitutional with the commodification of both the natural world and the laboring bodies that is at the heart of racial capitalism. At the same time, the circulation of commodified and globalized drugs into bodies helped produce and institutionalize struggles over “modern,” differentiated subject-making that were key to both capitalism and to constitution of today’s global political order. Building on Sylvia Wynter's work, we argue that race, drugs and Euro-colonial modernity are entangled through a process we call denaturalization. Denaturalization is the process by which Euro-colonial “modern” ideologies aimed at the control of the natural environment, at the autonomy of certain individuals from their “natures,” and at classifying some humans as more “natural” than others, become institutionalized, and come to shape the political and economic management of humans and their environments across the scales of individual consciousness and racial capitalism.