disaster reps bad

In September of 2017, two back to back hurricanes hit the US territory of Puerto Rico causing unprecedented damage, leaving residents without electricity for nearly a year, deepening an already existing fiscal crisis, and bringing about massive social change that many are still struggling to understand. Since Hurricane Maria, I have been trying to think and write about how this storm ripped the veil off Puerto Rico's colonial status, as much for those observing from afar who had perhaps never stopped to contemplate Puerto Rico's relationship to the United States, as well as for local residents who were forced into an affective reckoning with the kinds of structural violence they had been enduring for decades.

In this project, I seek to examine how climate change, the shifts brought about by the epoch of the Anthropocene, and the governmentality of debt with its neoliberal calls for austerity and resilience, are all shaped by what some describe as the coloniality of power.1 Indeed, I ask whether colonialism itself might not be best understood as a kind of disaster or, as Nelson Maldonado Torres (2016) suggests, a veritable catastrophe.

This has led me towards an engagement with the large cannon of work on “disaster-ology” within the social sciences, which allows me to extend a series of already well-established arguments: First, the fact that there is no such thing as a natural disaster: all disasters are socially produced (Oliver-Smith, Hoffman, & Hoffman, 1999; Wisner, Blaikie, Blaikie, Cannon, & Davis, 2004). Second, that disasters should not be understood as sudden events, but rather the outcome of long processes of slow, structural violence (Carrigan, 2015; Davies, 2018; Kwate & Threadcraft, 2018; Nixon, 2011). Thirdly, that “Vulnerability” (both social and environmental) is not a natural state but the product of racio-colonial governance (Schuller, 2016; Wisner et al., 2004). Lastly, that, despite lip service to the contrary, disasters do not operate as “great levelers.”; tTheir effects are experienced differentially through pre-existing hierarchies of race, class, and gender and in fact they often sharpen those relations of inequality (Gómez-Barris, 2017; Nishime & Hester Williams, 2018).

Given all this, my focus is thus not on what Hurricane Maria has caused, but on what it has revealed: namely, how it has laid bare the forms of structural violence and racio-colonial governance that had been operating in Puerto Rico for centuries.2

One of the first things Maria revealed is precisely the place of Puerto Rico within a broad US archipelago of racialized neglect. This ties it to sites of climatic disaster like New Orleans (Giroux, 2007, 2015; Danziger & Danziger, 2006; Dyson & Elliott, 2010), but also to places of urban ruin and social neglect like Detroit (Desan, 2014; Sugrue, 2014). This in turn requires us to interrogate the United States as a racial-imperial formation and to critically assess the intertwined nature of racial and imperial governance.

Additionally, Maria reveals the insufficiencies of certain theories of “disaster capitalism” that fail to show how it is the “slow violence” of colonial and racial governance which sets the stage for the accelerated dispossession made evident in a state of emergency (Schuller & Maldonado, 2016). That is, the accelerated forms of extraction and dispossession evident in the wake of modern disasters are conditioned by the subjectivities and technologies of the colonial encounter. For this reason, I argue that disaster capitalism needs to be understood as foundationally a form of racio-colonial capitalism, that emerges directly out of the capitalist incubator of plantation slavery (Beckert, 2015; Beckles, 2013; Johnson, 2013; Mintz, 1977, 1985; Williams, 1961).3

This in turn requires us to question our understandings of “resilience, or the ability to absorb and bounce back from experiences of shock (Barrios, 2016; Fast & Collin-Vézina, 2010; Kaika, 2017; Mullings, 2005). In recent years, innumerable governmental and international agencies have been promoting resilience as a desired state for communities and nations. The United Nations and the World Bank have numerous campaigns aimed at making cities and communities resilient. There are even resilience scorecards that allow governments to measure up against international targets and indicators (UNISDR, 2017). Following the September 11 attacks, as FEMA fell under the jurisdiction of Homeland Security, the idea of resilience has expanded and become increasingly tied to the security apparatus, becoming a prescribed quality for not just the neoliberal state, but the security state as well (Anderson & Adey, 2011; Coaffee, 2008; 2016; Dunn Cavelty, Kaufmann, & Søby Kristensen, 2015). This suggests a new ideology in which the state is imagined as incapable of eliminating threats—both political and environmental—or addressing their causes. Instead, communities and individuals must bear the brunt of mitigating rising threats of violence—both slow/structural and spectacular.

This push for resiliency must be approached with a great deal of caution. We certainly want our buildingsq and bridges to be resilient, but do we really want our communities to become well-adapted to structural (and infrastructural) violence? Some see these rising calls for resilience as part of the larger dominance of neoliberal forms of governmentality across the globe, in which citizenship is increasingly being refashioned as individualized self-care. With the increasing cuts in social safety nets, all individuals are increasingly being called upon to take on entrepreneurial modes of self-care and self-management (Muehlebach, 2012). However, we must ask: which communities have historically been required to demonstrate resilience and incessantly forced to endure both the shocks of neoliberalism and the slow traumatic violence of colonial extraction? And is it possible that the push towards resillience has actually made them disproportionately vulnerable to the current challenges of climate change?

With these queries in mind, my hope is that ultimately this project can help us develop new ways of imagining what recovery might look like. That is, if we understand disasters to have deep colonial histories, how can we formulate visions of repair that take those longer trajectories into account? How can we develop visions of recovery that do notsimply re-establish a previous state of inequity, or prepare populations to endure future forms of structural violence, but which instead offer substantive forms of transformation and redress?

This paper is divided into three broad sections. I begin by offering an “affective map” of life in Puerto Rico after Maria. Here I give a sense of the lived experience of the storm and its aftermath, focusing on the temporal logics that transformed a state of emergency into a state of endurance (Povinelli, 2011). The second part explores the economic and political landscape that set the stage for the storm: how Puerto Rio was already in ruins, already prey to vulture, disaster, and imperial capitalism, and already a site of increasing calls for neoliberal resilience. The final section examines how local residents are trying to reimagine the island's political future in the aftermath of this catastrophic sedimentation and how neoliberal calls for self-reliance converge with anti-colonial projects of self-determination. Here I address the dual meanings of emergencia as a state of both emergency and emergence.