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Articles 1 - 3 of 3
Full-Text Articles in Social and Cultural Anthropology
Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, And La Futura Cuir, Yarimar Bonilla
Postdisaster Futures: Hopeful Pessimism, Imperial Ruination, And La Futura Cuir, Yarimar Bonilla
Publications and Research
This essay discusses how Puerto Ricans are imagining and building new futures out of a political context of material and affective ruin that is not guided by the promise of a modernist future or the palliative anticipation of a sovereignty to come. It examines how the politics of ruination might lead to a “hopeful pessimism” that could break with the nostalgic immobility of the arrested present. It concludes by exploring the possibilities of an emerging cuir (queer) futurity that breaks with raced and gendered scripts of postcolonial sovereignty to envision a new postdisaster future.
The Coloniality Of Disaster: Race, Empire, And The Temporal Logics Of Emergency In Puerto Rico, Usa, Yarimar Bonilla
The Coloniality Of Disaster: Race, Empire, And The Temporal Logics Of Emergency In Puerto Rico, Usa, Yarimar Bonilla
Publications and Research
This essay uses the case of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico to discuss “the coloniality of disaster”: how catastrophic events like hurricanes, earthquakes, but also other forms political and economic crisis deepen the fault lines of long-existing racial and colonial histories. It argues that disaster capitalism needs to be understood as a form of racio-colonial capitalism and that this in turn requires us to question our understandings of both “resilience” and “recovery.” The article focuses on the “wait of disaster” as a temporal logic of state subjugation and on how Puerto Ricans responded to state abandonment through modes of autogesti� …
Authenticating Loss And Contesting Recovery: Fema And The Politics Of Colonial Disaster Management, Sarah Molinari
Authenticating Loss And Contesting Recovery: Fema And The Politics Of Colonial Disaster Management, Sarah Molinari
Publications and Research
The chapter discusses how institutional regulators of disaster recovery "authenticate" loss and contribute to the process of disciplining disaster subjects. Drawing on ethnographic research after Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, the chapter suggests that alternative grassroots approaches to disaster recovery point to a reimagining of "recovery" organized around a framework of support and affective relations.