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Abstract

The Caribbean region has been (re)shaped by colonial transformations of Amerindian ecologies, enslavement of Africans, and Indenture of Asians on plantations designed for European profit. Yet longstanding practices of resistance to human–environmental domination and ecocidal violence have enabled Caribbean people to (re)create and sustain affirmative socio-ecologies. This report reflects on four axes characterizing the contestations over Caribbean environmental geographies: resistance to extractivism and dispossession, denaturalization of disaster, theorizing global ecological justice, and pursuit of repair. The article suggests how Caribbean environmental philosophy and ecocriticism offer analytics for mapping relational geographies beyond Western epistemes of progress and spatial imaginaries that peripheralize the region.

Keywords

Caribbean studies decolonial ecology environmental justice island studies

I. Introduction

Caribbean scholars have situated the region as central to the unfolding of global capitalism and modernity (Wynter 1971; Mintz 1986; Williams 1994; Hudson 2019; Ferdinand 2022). Their critical spatial analyses clarify how new socio-environmental relations emerged from the Antilles through racial violence and ecocide. The Antilles as a name for the Caribbean derives from classical period European legends of Antillia, a phantom isle in the Atlantic. Antillia became a stand in for the mythic lands that were believed to lie beyond Iberia. Increased European contact with the Canary Islands in the fourteenth-century sparked renewed desire to explore the western Atlantic. That the Caribbean is called the Antilles reflects the fraught inheritances of European exploration, the geopolitics of toponymic inscription, and the social construction of human–environmental geographies. The Antilles is the result of a world-making according to European colonial imaginaries which rationalized the destruction of Indigenous Amerindian societies, the enslavement of Africans, and indenture of Asians as collateral damage for progress (Grove 1996; DeLoughrey 2004; Horne 2018). While the historical geographies of the Caribbean are not reducible to the human and ecological catastrophes that defined European colonization, many contours of the region's human–environmental geographies reflect the enduring effects of colonialism and coloniality (Mintz and Price 1985; Barker and McGregor 1995; Besson and Momsen 2017; Potter et al. 2015; Barker et al. 2016; Sheller 2020).

The contours of Caribbean geographies also reflect the insurgent practices of freedom-making that challenge the telos of colonial domination and colonially circumscribed futures. In the face of climate disasters, Caribbean people continue to refuse the futures offered them by racial capitalism, the vocabulary of the Anthropocene, and inadequate governance and policy responses to the climate crises. Caribbean activists and scholars also show how climate disasters are themselves haunting consequences of the widespread ecological transformations under plantation regimes. These transformations produced the raw materials and wealth that fueled the industries that would usher in global fossil fuel dependency.

If, as Sylvia Wynter (1971, 95) has argued, “we are all, without exception, still ‘enchanted’… [in the] bewitched reality” of the Atlantic market economy, then Caribbean environmental geographies offer crucial insights for nature-society scholars concerned with demystifying modernity and capitalism. Caribbean environmental geographies uniquely remark upon the persisting afterlives of “modernity's hurricane” (Ferdinand 2022, 12). In this report, I offer a sketch of the contours of recent scholarship on Caribbean environmental geographies. I focus on Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous geographies. This scholarship shares the skepticism of the notion of progress embraced by this journal. As the editors noted in their introductory editorial, “Linear, Western ideas of ‘progress’ underwrite deep, ongoing social and environmental injustices and devastation” (The PiEG Editorial Collective 2021, 3). Political struggles against impositions of “progress” and place-making for alternative time-space of human–environment relations define Caribbean environmental geographies.

I parse this varied and rich scholarship into broad themes, these are not meant to suggest discrete boundaries, but to note nodes of scholarly convergence. Next, taking seriously the PiEG editorial collective's encouragement to notice diverse conceptual and methodological engagements with the notion of progress, I suggest how Caribbean environmental geographies advance relational understandings of human–environment interrelations across time-space. The paper ends with a proposition for more ethical engagement with the Caribbean.

II. The contours of Caribbean environmental geographies

Caribbean geographies are textured by the historical collision and convergence of cultural systems, relations to environment, and socio-political projects of world historical-geographical magnitude (Mintz 1974; Lowe 2015). The Caribbean was an impossible reality. In feudal Europe's cartographic imaginary, the region was presumed to be part of the world outside god's grace and, therefore, submerged under the sea (Wynter 1995, 1997; Beckles 1997). Columbus landing on solid ground in the “West Indies” and the existence of inhabitants constituted contradictions to the European religious and geographical worldviews. Europeans resolved these contradictions through discursive moves and political performances, such as the reading of the Spanish Requirement of 1513 (Requerimiento). Colonizers declared the region to be a divine bequeathal and declared Indigenous peoples to be heathens who had no rights to property. These maneuvers sought to negate Indigenous presence and rationalize the introduction of mines and plantations. The European colonial socio-ecological imaginary was and is at odds with that of the Indigenous Caribbean people, as well as the Africans and South Asians (and their descendants) impelled into the Atlantic world-economy. These lines of contestation today map the contours of Caribbean environmental struggles.

2.1 Extractivism and the cartographies of struggle

The political ecologies of mining are among the most dramatic examples of how regional environmental struggles reflect local communities’ contestation of the coloniality of resource management and extractivism. As George Beckford (1987, 1) opined, the mining industry is one that exemplifies the “ratooning of the plantation system of relationships” in postcolonial Caribbean environmental geographies. Environmental justice struggles against mining point to how the stories of non-white Caribbean peoples have been stories of struggle for land (Girvan 1976; Beckford 1978; Crichlow 2005; Besson and Momsen 2017; Look et al. 2019). Grassroots activists and environmental non-governmental organizations have, with differing degrees of success, framed mining as an encroachment on the socio-territorial sovereignty of traditional and Indigenous communities. Challenging developmentalist justifications of mining, their work reframes mining as a threat to biodiversity and the natural heritage of forest-dwelling or forest-dependent communities (Fuentes-George 2013, 2016; Connell 2020; Nisbett 2021).

This environmental activism unsettles the kind of progress that could ever come from systematic extraction that leaves ecological scars on the landscape, dust in people's lungs, and mine water in their aquifers. In a region where governments are increasingly headed by individuals born after the independence era, such activism against extractive-driven development is especially poignant. As such, Caribbean environmental geographies offer glimpses of how postcolonial and post-independence conceptions of (under)development are reconciled with dependence on or deference to external capitalist interests, sovereignty, governance of national patrimony, and sustainability (Machado 2017; Jobson 2018).

The extractive frontier is organized not only around mineral mining, but prospecting for and extraction of oil and gas, especially in the Indigenous hinterlands of Guyana and Suriname (Jobson 2019; Cordis 2021). Communities face not only violent displacement, but the socio-ecological effects of boom-and-bust cycles. In the Caribbean, as in only a few other regions, the regimes of ecologically unequal exchange of biophysical resources coincide with both uneven access to aesthetic landscapes (like beaches and forests), and racial imaginaries that exoticize place and fetishize bodies (Mullings 2000; Sheller 2003, 2021a).

The “epistemological disjuncture,” between how communities understand and relate to land and ecosystems vis-à-vis central governments and capitalist interests creates risk not only of epistemological violence, but physical violence against “entangled more-than-human communities” (Favini 2018, 23–24, 27). The threats and instantiations of violence are being meant by insurgent claims-making, assertions of belonging, and diverse performances of ecological rights, often anchored in conceptualizations of ancestrality and folk-heritage (McIntosh and Renard 2009; Campbell et al. 2021; Vandebroek et al. 2021; Zhang et al. 2023). Assertions of Black-Indigenous heritage, grassroots organizing around Black-Indigenous unity, and communality also serve to reframe resources as commons (Anderson 2007; Mollett 2014; Gould and Lewis 2018; Nisbett 2021; Veronesi et al. 2022). The diverse forms of refusing “ownershiplessness” or institutionalized alienation (Goffe 2023a, 2023b) are materially and symbolically recontouring the spatiality of Caribbean environmental geographies and clarifying of the valence of sovereignty and recognition at different scales in postcolonial political ecologies (Baptiste and Robinson 2023).

2.2 (Un)natural disasters and environmental subjectivity

The politics of sovereignty and recognition give material effect to the racial ideologies of enslaveability, possession, humanness, disposability, and killability (McKittrick 2006). The recuperation of hierarchies of differentiation, relations of gender-sexual oppression, and racial regimes of property across colonial, post-, and neo-colonial environmental geographies can make those dynamics seem natural or intractable. Regional scholars and activists have challenged such attempts to naturalize and spatialize the expendability and exploitation of Caribbean people. What coheres through this scholarship are incisive and poetic indictments of the coloniality of disasters. One aspect of this work denaturalizes disasters and pandemics by showing the colonial provenance of the vulnerabilities that hazards unravel. In so doing, Caribbean thinkers expose the linkages between the social catastrophes in the wake of hazardous events, disease outbreaks, and economic shocks, and Euro-American imperialism (Felima 2009; Baptiste and Rhiney 2016; Lloréns 2018; Hudson 2019; Birn 2020; Perry and Sealey-Huggins 2023).

The quality of public infrastructure such as drainage, patterns of urban/rural, and coastal/inland development, as well as the geography of housing all reflect colonial regimes of property and regional planning that prioritized the plantation economy (Look et al. 2019; Robinson et al. 2023a). The role of these colonial factors in shaping material conditions of life means that “disasters” are not aberrations nor unmitigable mishaps, but recurrent consequences of constrained sovereignty, racist disaster management, and organized abandonment in emergency response (Moulton and Machado 2019; Bonilla 2020a). This conceptualization interrogates the epistemological and practical limits of discourses of “building back better” and “bouncing back” and offers “disaster capitalism,” “disaster colonialism,” and “disaster trap” as analytics for understanding the longitudinal outcomes of recurrent disasters alongside coloniality (Rhiney 2018, 2020; Popke and Rhiney 2019; Bonilla 2020b; Rivera 2022; Wilkinson and Campbell 2022; Robinson et al. 2023b).

Since the disaster trap is “a dynamic in which self-reinforcing feedback drive a system toward an undesirable and seemingly inescapable state, with negative consequences that tend to amplify each other over time” (Lazarus 2022, 578), Caribbean environmental geographies highlight the racial colonial calculations in uncritical idealization of resilience and adaptation. It follows from this that disaster philanthropy, emergency recovery loans, and the climate finance mechanisms promise the maintenance of the status quo rather than radical change (Mullings et al. 2010; Grove 2021; Friedman 2023). Instead, what the Caribbean political-ecological context shows is that “development justice” (Gahman and Thongs 2020) and reparative “loss and damage funding” hold out promise for more just futures (Sealey-Huggins 2017; Perry 2020, 2021; Lai et al. 2022; Thomas and Benjamin 2023).

Besides clarifying the racist bio-evolutionarily calculations that suffuse disaster geographies (Wynter 2003), the varied experiences of Caribbean countries show that situated knowledges mediate the reading and misreading of landscapes of risk and solutions conjured to solve crises (Grove 2013; Donovan 2021; Borie and Fraser 2023). Methodologically, refusing views and visualizing practices that render the difference between the islands insignificant in a meta-narrative of paradise destroyed and through animated before and after satellite imagery, Caribbean environmental geographers’ work both insists on place specificity and encourage comparative and relational analyses (Sheller and León 2016; Moulton and Machado 2019).

What the Caribbean environmental geographies discussed in this section offer is not simply empirical extension of U.S. environmental justice concepts. These studies reflect on the unique and collective experience of Caribbean small island socio-ecologies navigating postcolonial and post-independence development and recurrent hazards. Appeals for justice are not being made to the state (e.g. federal law of state courts), but often against the state, former colonial powers, and foreign capitalist interest accommodated by the state. Consequently, Caribbean environmental geographies complicate the notions of justice and responsibility and expand the phenomenology of ecological injustice at question in the environmental justice movement.

2.3 Environmental crises and Black ecologies of justice

It is not just that instances of disasters and recovery are shaped by colonial public policy and postcolonial political geographies. Caribbean scholars show that contemporary risk society and emergencies are the haunting afterlives of colonial modernity. What these insights offer are openings to locate the Caribbean as a central locale in the global socio-ecological catastrophe, thereby centering the Antilles as ground from which to improvise new futures (Wynter 2003; Wynter and McKittrick 2015). This longue durée perspective and looking at the world from the Caribbean challenges Euro-American narratives of human history and offers new analytical vocabulary to historicize intersecting global ecological catastrophes, socio-economic calamities, and cultural-political crises.

The Plantationocene and Negrocene call attention to the racialized dispossession and violence of modernity and colonialism (McKittrick 2011, 2013; Davis et al. 2019; Ferdinand 2022). The Plantationocene connects the plantation system to contemporary socio-ecological injustice. The environmental destruction wrought by the development of a transatlantic economy anchored in the plantation and extractivism usher in our unfolding and cascading socio-ecological crises. Experiments with new regimes of labor and industrial production in the Caribbean provided the capital and prototypes for the European Industrial Revolution (Mintz 1986; Ouma and Premchander 2022).

The Negrocene names the “unjust way of inhabiting the Earth where a minority feeds upon the vital energy of a majority that is socially discriminated against and politically dominated. As the other side of the Plantationocene, the Negrocene signals the geological era where the extension of colonial inhabitation and the destruction of the environment is accompanied by the material, social, and political production of Negroes” (Ferdinand 2022, 59–60). The “Negro” in Ferdinand's conception is not just people racialized as Black, but humans and nonhumans relegated to an off-world status. Which is an existence of forced detachment from ancestral geographies, political exception, and systematic socio-ecological rupture. Such examinations excavate “the layers of bones” that “become ossified in the bedrock” underneath “extractive imperialism” (Goffe 2019, 29–30). These critiques expose how the Anthropocene and Capitalocene are analytically anemic for a historiography of global ecological crisis, to say nothing of the socio-cultural crises of modernity's racialism. The racial architecture of modernity is obscured by the Anthropocene and Capitalocene even though race and racism are central to the very calamities the terms seek to address.

The Plantationocene and Negrocene help to connect ecological crises of biodiversity loss, pollution, and so-called invasive species to racial politics of environmental transformation, the military-industrial complex, and natural resource governance (Baver 2012). By clarifying the connections between imperial agriculture, forestry, and horticulture, and geographies of race, migration, and state-making, Caribbean environmental geographers both critique the classificatory regimes of environmental history and center the prospects of fugitive ecologies (Edwards 2014; Favini 2018, 2023; Ferdinand 2022; Welch and Finneran 2022; Moulton 2023). As allegories for capacious agroecological visions of Indigenous, Black, and Indentured people and their descendants (Wynter 1971; DeLoughrey 2011), fugitive Caribbean ecologies evince an “alternative spatial order” (Sheller 2007, 212). As such, the Caribbean offers environmental geographies just the kinds of accounts of “survivance and diverse histories of abundance that are hidden if we fetishize crisis”; the accounts that the editors of PiEG invite us to center (The PiEG Editorial Collective 2021, 4).

2.4 Environments of resistance and fugitivity

If Caribbean scholars remind us to notice how the mere cultivation of plants constituted resistance, it is because constant and multiple forms of resistance characterize the historical environmental geographies of the Caribbean (Price 1996; Eddins 2022; Gross-Wyrtzen and Moulton 2023). The fugitive ecologies across the Antilles evince liberatory place-making, insurgent environmental epistemologies, and organic theories of human–environmental relationality. Marronage and the Haitian Revolution were dramatic expressions of these protean efforts to create new socio-ecologies that would support thriving (Nevius 2020; Dunnavant 2021a, 2021b; Moulton 2023). Fugitivity gave way to diverse movements striving to create anticolonial human geographies and abolitionist ecologies. These range from labor rebellions to Rastafarianism and from the landless peasant uprisings to civil disobedience demanding the decommissioning of monuments to colonialism (Simone 2023).

Sonic geographies, affective relationality, and more-than-human cosmologies helped a wide category of masterless people undertake marronage and fugitivity (Scott 2020). The place-making of these masterless people highlights the role of multiple forms of spatial literacy and environmental knowledge. These are worth our attention as we examine the contours of Caribbean environmental geographies (Clark 2021; Alhassan 2022; Padilioni 2022). Multidimensional accounts of fugitivity and resistance help us understand both the contestations over the material and symbolic production of space (i.e. the ways that environmental geographies are reproduced) and the competing ontologies and epistemologies of nature at work. Such accounting demands new ways of seeing the archives and the proffering of new archives through which environmental geographers seek understanding of peoples’ relationship to nature. As importantly, the varied environmental geographies of fugitivity suggest the need to attend not just to how communities refuse unlivable human–environmental relations, but also how they advance repair and abolition (Sheller 2018; Lewis 2020, 2023; Simone 2022; Goffe 2023a).

III. Beyond progress: Conjunctures

The legacies of the Indigenous genocide, Indigenous land theft, imposition of racial regimes of property, Black enslavement, and Asian Indentureship haunt Caribbean environmental geographies. New nightmares are caused by immobilizing debt and structural adjustments programs that have caused mass abandonment of many Caribbean people, usually the poorest and lowest on colorism's hierarchy. New forms of postcolonial securitizing are being deployed to police the post-independence frustrations. Hurricanes provide annual reminders of the material inadequacy of colonial infrastructures and the bureaucracies colonialism institutionalized. In the face of such recursivity, the notion of progress seems especially fraught. To say this is to not deny the new and newly articulated forms of struggle, activist solidarity, and reparative visions that animate Caribbean world-making. Indeed, the fervency of these emergent and innovative practices and politics have remade the Antilles.

However, to call into question “progress” is to notice the continuities between how Caribbean peoples and Caribbean geographies have fared over a longue durée of repeated encounters with colonialism and capitalism. The pirates of the Caribbean have different vessels, but they seek the same kind of booty. The central wisdom of Caribbean geographers is that archipelagic life and livelihood is orientated towards deep understanding of these recurrent patterns. It makes sense to observe how place-epistemologies challenge path dependency and how place poetics are used to imagine and practice new realities into being.

Caribbean environmental philosophers and ecocritical poets have offered varied conceptualizations that speak to the themes of intraregional existence. These notions offer deft elucidation of the patterns characterizing the Caribbean's interregional interactions especially with Europe and North America. Among these concepts are relationality (Glissant 1989, 1990); tidalectic geographies and differentiated mobilities (Brathwaite 1973, 1975, 1999); and archipelagos (Wynter 2003; Benítez-Rojo 1997). Together, these offer rich analytical vocabulary for understanding the phenomenology of Caribbean environmental geographies (see also DeLoughrey 2010; Pugh 2018; Chandler and Pugh 2021; Sheller 2021b). Brathwaite's (1999) conception of tidalectics, for example, looks to the Caribbean sea and tidal rhythms to understand the relational and environmental geographies. He asks, “Why is our psychology not dialectical –successfully dialectical– in how Western philosophy has assumed people's lives should be, but tidalectic, like our grandmother's … like the movement of the ocean she's walking on, coming from one continent/continuum, touching another, and then receding (reading) from the island(s) into the perhaps creative chaos of the(ir) future” (1999, 34).

Brathwaite's approach constitutes a form of thinking with the Caribbean; an approach that considers the analytical purchase of Caribbean human–environmental relationships for understanding the region and the World. The ebb and flow of the tides is a recurrent dynamic which moves material along the beach; it is simultaneously a depositional and erosional geomorphological process. As opposed to Western notions of progress realized through the resolution of dialectical contradictions, tidalectics suggests patterns of disruption and settlement, or movement and inertia that are neither binary nor antagonistic. The simultaneity of processes demands attention to the multiplicity of relations in which people and places are entangled. Rather than solid ground advancing by accretion of sand, the beach is a liminal and ephemeral formation—in constant adjustment (King 2019).

Thinking with that poetics of landscape, Brathwaite troubles the security of progress and the certainty of the future by showing how the past revisits and remains. The tidalectic analytic also challenges a view of Caribbean geographies as fractured or a set of singularities. Instead, Brathwaite argued that across the “multilingual, multi-ethnic many ancestored” “fragments,” the “unity [of the disparate islands] is submarine,” proposing that the archipelago is more than geomorphological, but reflective of tidalectic socio-cultural processes of place-making (Brathwaite 1975, 1). Similarly, Wynter, following Fanon, uses the idea of a “damned archipelago of the Poor” to understand the political geography populated by those deemed underdeveloped, composed of the jobless, the poor, and the homeless, the underdeveloped, and the criminalized. Wynter's archipelagic thinking connects the variously “Othered” people relegated to statuses outside default conceptions of the human.

If we read such conceptions alongside Pat Noxolo's framework of in/security (Noxolo and Featherstone 2014; Noxolo 2018), the relational ontologies of the Caribbean map regional geographies outside dominant Western epistemological grooves and practices of teleological narration. The framework of (in)security helps us understand the differential experiences of Caribbean subjectivity and the uneven outcomes of Caribbean encounters with global forces. Noxolo uses (in)security to account for the simultaneity of widely divergent realities engendered by the creation and reproduction of societies and economies. On the one hand, some people enjoy conditions of security and well-being, while on the other hand people suffer from insecurity, social detriment, and death. Patterns of (in)security shift across time-space and scales of examination. The (in)security framework reiterates the insight that in the wake of colonialism the intersections of race, gender, class, and other axes of identity mediate access to autonomy, justice, and sovereignty. As Noxolo (2018, 39) argues for example, the Caribbean's “status as a global ‘crossroads’ highlight how insecurity and security are produced over time through the ongoing, iterative friction of legal and illegal flows of people and goods across the region.” Consequently, the region “reveals that specifically located and historical configurations of security and insecurity are articulated across a range of different temporalities—sudden, chronic, and geologic—and different spatialities, all of them territorially bounded, transnationally networked, and globally pervasive. Security and insecurity are therefore not fixed, either in their definition or in their form” (Noxolo 2018, 39).

Noxolo's (in)security framework highlights the practices of improvisation and negotiation of Caribbean spaces that are fractal, but not fractured. Such practices weave together communities across generations, through affinity and informal adoptions rather than narrow familial kinship. Subjectivities are mobile, and so too must representations of individuals and the communities they constitute. Through the framework of (in)security we can notice how “negotiative agency” (Noxolo 2018, 39) at different scales confront vulnerability, making the outcome of encounters with natural hazards, violence, economic disruptions, and environmental destruction contingent.

As counter-geographical relations to linearity, tidalectic cycles across the archipelago are shaped by and reshape patterns of differentiated security and insecurity. The archipelago is a complex social-spatial order, the realities of which are contoured and recontoured by tidal forces of global capitalism, seasonally recurrent hazards, various forms of colonialism and coloniality and neo-imperial political economies. These forces chafe against rituals that invest Caribbean life with affirmative meaning, reinvention, mimesis, and multiple forms of refusal. What emerges are material and metaphorical infrastructures that are destroyed and creatively reconstructed according to the competing designs and desires of actors differently situated in hierarchies of power. New forms emerged and old ones persist. The ephemerality and performance of these infrastructures offer forms of surety that are important not in their dependability but in their possibility. This calls for conjunctural analysis.

The archipelago shows that even though islands are singular, they are not singularities, they repeat. This insight invites environmental geographers to take the plurality of territory seriously, and to think-with the island as a political geographical analytic. Island environmental geographies are not reducible to land. Oceans and seas shape islands. Thinking with the island, therefore, means rejecting a view of the ocean as a place without history. In Caribbean environmental geographies, the sea is heavy with meaning, not just a thoroughfare, but a theater of action. When the hold could not contain the human cargo, Africans were thrown into sea. This practice of off-boarding and drowning is reprised in the lifeboat ethics of some narratives of planetary crisis (Ferdinand 2022). But Africans also leapt to watery graves, choosing the ocean over the terrors they knew awaited at ports in the Americas. The archipelago of (in)security suggests a need to listen to the voices of the drowned and drowning to understand the climate (im)mobilities and the island futures ushered in by disaster, coloniality, and debt (Sheller 2018, 2020; Bonilla 2020a; Griffen and Robinson. 2023; Perry 2023).

IV. Final considerations

What if we understand the Caribbean archipelago as including the U.S. (Turtle Island), Mexico, and Honduras, in the way we understand Belize and Guyana to be Caribbean? To begin with, such a mapping practice upsets colonial and Cartesian geographies and asks that we pay attention to patterns of care, barriers to mobility, exposures to racialized, gendered, and other forms of violence, and the workings of domination that are not contained by national geographies. In an archipelagic political ecology, the islands and the mainland geographies are connected while also simultaneously being disconnected and unevenly accessible. As such, the Caribbean supplies a framework for relational environmental geographies attentive to how ecological violence and crises are refracted across space. More radically, such a cartography invites a counter proposition to the Monroe Doctrine that the Caribbean is in America's backyard: the U.S. is on the Caribbean's verandah. Whereas the backyard might be understandable as private property, a space that should not be trespassed on, the verandah is a public space of reasoning and access to it is not restricted by blood kinship. The verandah is a space of encounter, a site in its own regard, as well as a transition zone between inside and outside. It is, among other things, “an architectural response to climate,” a shaded area (Hudson 2006, 148).

I want to propose the verandah as a space of ethical engagement. As such, a verandah politics calls for forms of engagement that address social hierarchies and colonial differences as they are structured by enduring social and material infrastructure and aesthetics. Since racial ecologies are given solidity through social choreographies, including research encounters, a verandah politics invites us to take seriously the material and symbolic architectures that structure how we approach the Caribbean and its people. The welcome and shade of the verandah offer an affordance that we might use to negotiate the ontological, epistemological, methodological terms of engagement. A verandah politics centers potentially unsettling questions about our interests in the interiority of people's lives when those lives have been affected by colonial violence and racial capitalism. But such politics might also remind us that the intimate geographies of people's lives exceed the environmental geographies we have access to. The verandah offers a vantage point to look at the world ecology, to get a glimpse of how the contestation of imperial designs instantiated islands of care, improvisation, and repair to weather modernity's tempests.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Alex A. Moulton

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Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession,disasters,justice,and repair across the Caribbean archipelago

Abstract

Keywords

I. Introduction

II. The contours of Caribbean environmental geographies

2.1 Extractivism and the cartographies of struggle

2.2 (Un)natural disasters and environmental subjectivity

2.3 Environmental crises and Black ecologies of justice

2.4 Environments of resistance and fugitivity

III. Beyond progress: Conjunctures

IV. Final considerations

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

References