Abstract
This article examines the interlocking of nature and race within the overarching framework of the turn toward an idiom of ‘preparedness’ in disaster expertise in Guyana. Tracking the question of racial insecurity following disastrous floods in 2005, the article discusses disaster preparedness interventions as working against the country’s process toward postsocialist racial democratization. In this respect, disaster preparedness has had contradictory effects on security and has enacted a sort of public critique and humor about its inaptness. On the basis of this ethnographic case, the article argues that a practice and language of preparedness is as much about technocratic know-how as it is a style of political humor itself. In this theorization, preparedness is more than contingent, and so is a necessary temporal moment in which people work to imagine a new relationship to nature in recognition of their everyday life molded to environmental and racial-political vulnerability.
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