The Resilience of the Pest

The Resilience of the Pest Jesse Arseneault (bio) and Rosemary-Claire Collard (bio) Introduction: Colonial Worlds, Animality, and the Production of the Pest A chorus from world leaders and experts is calling for people, cities, economies, and ecosystems to be resilient amid the climate change and runaway biodiversity loss that characterize the Anthropocene. In the critical social sciences and humanities, this pursuit of resilience has been widely (though not unanimously) critiqued, largely for its business-as-usual tendency, taking for granted social structures and relations that ought to instead be subject to scrutiny and transformation.1 In this paper we take a different but we hope complementary tack. If multispecies resilience is the guiding thread woven through this cluster, our goal in this paper is to think through beings who are too resilient, too reproductive, and too exuberant. These beings may be most visible in the discourse of pestilence, though this term obscures their intimate relationship with the domesticated worlds pests are deemed to threaten. Marked as wild, unruly, and excessively lively, the resilience this paper traces is implicated in the political economy of colonial capitalism in that the pest both emerges as a threat to property and (some) humans' well-being and, concurrently, functions as a foundation for the colonization of wildness, to protect the colonial subject from life that is purportedly harmful or, in less extreme cases, inconvenient to anthroponormative worlds. Liberal state and capitalist institutions have since the onset of colonialism been bent on destroying an array of animal subjects that in many ways these structures helped engender: the cockroach, the invasive species, the disease-carrying cow, the flesh-eating [End Page 89] predator who paints the pastures red. Pest and vermin, while shifting signifiers for almost any animal that irritates colonial worlds, have therefore been durably lodged at the heart of what Billy-Ray Belcourt identifies as settler colonialism's investment in animality—they are core designations within the project of remaking "animal bodies into colonial subjects."2 The paper takes a tour through the interlocking zones of inquiry of its two authors: for Jesse Arseneault, postcolonial cultural studies and African literature; for Rosemary Collard, feminist political economy and political ecology; and, for both, an interest in biopolitical regimes' ongoing and cumulative effects on lives deemed expendable, excessive, or undesirable and targeted for eradication. The impetus behind the paper's range, which involves thinking across contexts, species, geographies, and theoretical paradigms, is not to flatten out the paper's disparate elements, but to come to a reading of transgressive pests' extensive movement and liveliness, as well as the technologies of power that seek to halt or contain them. As we hope to show, pests and their accompanying regulatory structures intellectually and politically demand careful thinking across contexts and species in order to work toward what Belcourt describes as "a non-speciesist and deontological re-figuring of human-animal relations."3 In doing so we aim to avoid a colonial politics of misrecognition that "forecloses [animality] within settler colonial infrastructures of subjecthood and governmentality," especially when states' pesticidal campaigns make such animals only legible through campaigns of pesticide and extermination.4 As such, the paper's central focus lies, in this era of increasing ecological concern, with those lives regarded as unimportant to the times and places of such concern, even those regarded as an ecological threat, who may—whether in agential forms of resistance or collective biosocial processes of undoing—work against the bounded geographies of settler colonial worlds, even as their movements are also partly produced by those worlds. Our affinity here lies with the figure of the pest who "is not only . . . stalked by death but . . . evades it."5 In its abject undesirability, the pest signals the limits of biopower's hold on life and death, especially with regard to governmentality's interest in controlling biosocial reproduction. The resilient pest indexes a particular form of animality generated amid the mobilities, enclosures, and exclosures of colonized worlds. "Pest," like Sara Ahmed's stranger, is a fetishism—the designation erases [End Page 90] the pest's "conditions of arrival."6 Although pestilence is frequently thought of as a quality essential to those bodies deemed pests or

Anthropocene · Colonialism · Environmental ethics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Scrutiny · Sociology · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Law

• The Joy of Pests

  Open Access•H Fair•Transactions of the Institute of…•2026

  Add to list

• Conservation beyond biopolitics

  Open Access•K Srinivasan•Transactions of the Institute of…•2024

  Add to list