The devastating impacts of Hurricanes Irma and Maria across the Caribbean (especially in Barbuda, Dominica, Puerto Rico, St Martin/St Maarten, and parts of the British and US Virgin Islands) are haunting harbingers of a world of climate disaster, halting recovery, and impossible futures. Being at the leading edge of the global capitalist exploitation of people and other living and non-living beings in a world-spanning system of vast inequity and severe injustice, Caribbean thinkers, writers, poets, philosophers, activists, and artists have long lived with, dwelt upon, and offered answers to the problem of being human after Man, as Sylvia Wynter puts it. This reflection on island futuring and defuturing offers a critical analysis of Caribbean “disaster recovery” and “climate adaptation” based on an understanding of the disjuncture between three uneven spatio-temporal realities: (1) the decelerating “islanding effects” of debt, foreign aid, and austerity; (2) the accelerating mobilities of the “offshore” and extended operational landscapes of “planetary urbanization”; and (3) the durational im/mobilities of Amerindian survival, Maroon escape, and Black/Indigenous cultural endurance of alternative ontologies.
ArboledaM (2015a)
Financialization, totality and planetary urbanization in the Chilean Andes. Geoforum67: 4–13.
2.
ArboledaM (2015b)
Spaces of extraction, metropolitan explosions: Planetary urbanization and the commodity boom in Latin America. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research40(1): 96–112.
3.
AronoffK (2017) Puerto Rico is on track for historic debt forgiveness – Unless Wall Street gets its way. The Intercept, 4 October.
4.
BonillaY (2017) Why would anyone in Puerto Rico want a hurricane? Because someone will get rich. Washington Post, 22 September.
5.
Benitez-RojoA (1996 [1992]) The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. 2nd ed. Trans. Maraniss JE. Durham: Duke University Press.
6.
BrennerN (2017)
Debating planetary urbanization: For an engaged pluralism. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space36(3): 570–590.
7.
BrennerNSchmidC (2015)
Towards a new epistemology of the urban?City19(2–3): 151–182.
8.
DeLoughreyE (2007) Routes and Roots.
Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press.
9.
DuBoisWEB (1998 [1935]) Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880.
New York:
Free Press.
10.
DunlapREBrulleRJ (eds) (2015) Climate Change and Society: Sociological Perspectives.
Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
11.
Enloe C (2000) Bananas, Bases, and Beaches: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Updated Edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
12.
EscobarA (2018) Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds.
Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
13.
FigueroaE (2008) Jamaica for Sale. Produced by Esther Figueroa. Copyright Vagabond Media and Jamaica Environment Trust. 92 min. Available at: www.jamaicaforsale.net (accessed 15 August 2018).
14.
FigueroaE (2018) Fly Me to the Moon. Produced by Esther Figueroa, with Emiel Martens and Mimi Sheller. Copyright Vagabond Media. 49 min.
15.
GiorgiF (2006)
Climate change hot-spots. Geophysical Research Letters3333: L08707.
16.
Global Weather Oscillations, Inc. (2017) Hurricane and tropical storm landfall predictions, United States – Lesser Antilles, 2018. Available at: www.globalweatheroscillations.com (accessed 17 July 2018).
17.
GOJ/EU/UNEP (2013) Climate change adaptation & disaster risk reduction project, “EU Climate Change – Jamaica”. The Caribbean Environment Programme. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). Available at: www.cep.unep.org/eu-climate-change (accessed 17 July 2018).
18.
GonzálezJEGeorgescuMLemosMCet al. (2017)
Climate change’s pulse is in Central America and the Caribbean. EOS98 Available at: https://doi.org/10.1029/2017EO071975
19.
GroveR (1995) Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
20.
Haraway D (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
21.
HallS (2003) Globalization: Cartographies of power (A talk at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, London University), event Cartographies of Power (1 October 2003).
22.
KamugishaA (2013)
On the idea of a Caribbean cultural studies.Small Axe41: 43–57.
23.
KamugishaA (2016)
The black experience of new world coloniality.Small Axe20(1): 129–145.
24.
KipferS (2017)
Pushing the limits of urban research: Urbanization, pipelines and counter-colonial politics. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space36(3): 474–493.
25.
KipferS (2014) The fractures of worldwide urbanization: Insights from the literary world. In: BrennerN (ed) Implosions/Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization.
Berlin:
Jovis, pp.288–308.
26.
KipferSGoonewardenaK (2013)
Urban Marxism and the post-colonial question: Henri Lefebvre and ‘colonization’. Historical Materialism21(2): 76–117.
27.
Klein N (2008) The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador
28.
KleinN (2018) The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Rico Takes on the Disaster Capitalists.
Chicago:
Haymarket Books.
29.
McKittrickK (2006) Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle.
Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press.
30.
Negrón-MuntanerFShellerM (2018) Caribbean Syllabus: Life and Debt in the Caribbean. New York, NY: Unpayable Debt Working Group. Available at: caribbeansyllabus.wordpress.com (accessed 1 September, 2018).
NixonAV (2015) Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture.
Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi.
33.
Nixon R (2013) Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
34.
RobertsBRStephensMA (2017) Introduction: Archipelagic American studies: Decontinentalizing the study of American culture. In: RobertsBRStephensMA (eds) Archipelagic American Studies.
Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
35.
SchoenJ (2017) Here’s how an obscure tax change sank Puerto Rico’s economy. CNBC, 26 September.
36.
SharpeC (2016) In the Wake: On Blackness and Being.
Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
37.
ShellerM (2007)
Virtual Islands: Mobilities, connectivity and the new Caribbean spatialities. Small Axe24: 16–33.
38.
ShellerM (2009a)
The new Caribbean complexity: Mobility systems, tourism and the re-scaling of development.The. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography30: 189–203.
39.
ShellerM (2009b)
Infrastructures of the imagined Island: Software, Mobilities and the architecture of Caribbean paradise. Environment and Planning A41: 1386–1403.
40.
ShellerM (2013)
The Islanding effect: Post-disaster mobility systems and humanitarian logistics in Haiti. Cultural Geographies20(2): 185–204.
41.
ShellerM (2014) Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity.
Cambridge:
MIT Press.
42.
ShellerM (2018) Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes.
London:
Verso.
43.
ShellerM (2019) Island Futures.
Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
44.
ShellerM (forthcoming) Archipelagoes as the fractal fringe of coloniality: De-militarizing Caribbean and Pacific Islands. In: StephensMMartínez-San MiguelY (eds) Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations.
45.
Spillers H (2003) Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book. In: Spillers H (ed.) Black, White and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 203–229.
46.
StephensM (2013)
What is an Island? Caribbean studies and the contemporary visual arts. Small Axe 17 (2 (41)): 8-26.
47.
TaylorM (2017) Climate change in the Caribbean – Learning lessons from Irma and Maria. The Guardian, 6 October.
48.
TeaiwaTK (2007) Island futures and sustainability. In: BaldacchinoG (ed) A World of Islands.
Charlottetown, PEI:
Island Studies Press.
49.
TrouillotM-R (2003) Global Transformations: Anthropology and the Modern World.
New York:
Palgrave Macmillan.
50.
UlysseGA (2015) Why Haiti Needs New Narratives: A Post-Quake Chronicle.
Middleton, CT:
Wesleyan University Press.
51.
UrryJ (2014) Offshoring.
Cambridge:
Polity Press.
52.
VanniniPBaldacchinoGGuayLet al. (2009)
Recontinentalizing Canada: Arctic Ice’s liquid modernity and the imagining of a Canadian Archipelago. Island Studies Journal4(2): 121–138.
53.
WehileyA (2014) Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human.
Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
54.
WhoriskeyP (2017) ‘Shrinking, shrinking, shrinking’: Puerto Rico faces a demographic disaster. The Washington Post, 18 October.
55.
WilsonJBayónM (2015)
Concrete jungle: The planetary urbanization of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Human Geography8(3): 1–23.
56.
WynterS (2003)
Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – An argument. CR: The New Centennial Review3(3): 257–337.
57.
YeampierreEKleinN (2017) Imagine a Puerto Rico recovery designed by Puerto Ricans. The Intercept, 20 October.
