Article on ‘Caribbean Futures in the Offshore Anthropocene: Debt, Disaster, and Duration’, published as part of a forum in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
Mimi Sheller, Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for Mobilities Research and Policy at Drexel University, gave the Society and Space lecture at the 2018 American Association of Geographers meeting in New Orleans. The paper on which the talk was based is now published in volume 36, issue 6 of Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. Its abstract reads:
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..
You can also find published responses from the three scholars who acted as respondents during the AAG session – Sharlene Mollett, Beverley Mullings, and Marion Werner – along with a reply from the author in a special Forum at the Society & Space open website.
The Coloniality of Climate
Sharlene Mollett raises the fundamental question of the relation between coloniality and climate change as integral and constitutive to the world today, such that climate change is a “manifestation of coloniality” rather than coming “on top of” it. I reply that we need to examine further what exactly links colonial processes to climate change, and how we might even conceptualize these as climates of coloniality or, better yet, the coloniality of climates.
I suggest that those who are refused entry to the future livable zones of the world – “the condemned of the Earth” following Frantz Fanon – are precisely those who live in coloniality’s racialized zones of exception, especially in the tropical regions that will be most harshly affected by climate change; where refugees from social, political and climatic violence are denied legal personhood, refused mobile citizenship, and excluded from self-determination of mobility and dwelling..