8. Dead Labor: On Racial Capital and Fossil Capital

Caribbeanist Anthropology and Minerva's Owl: Lessons Forgotten, Lessons Learned

“…But there certainly are emergent transitions to be studied in the region, and here I would point toward Vanessa Agard-Jones's (2013) work on environmental toxicity in Martinique, Rivke Jaffe's (2016) work on urban environmental justice in Jamaica and Curaçao, Kiran Jayaram's (2018) work on the social and cultural consequences of export mango production in Haiti, Ryan Jobson's (2021) ethnographies of petrochemical extraction in Trinidad, Olivia Gomes da Cunha's (2018Cunha's ( , 2021 work on the afterlife of American bauxite mining in a Suriname maroon village, or the questions of national sovereignty-or the lack thereof-explored by my former students: 11 Greg Beckett (2019), Yarimar Bonilla (2015Bonilla ( , 2020, Lee Cabatingan (2016Cabatingan ( , 2018Cabatingan ( , 2020, Jeffrey Kahn (2019), and Chelsey Kivland (2020) in the context of Haiti's perennial crisis, Guadeloupe's syndicalist movement, the Trinidad-based Caribbean Court of Justice, the evolution of the U.S.-Haitian water border, or grass roots organizing in Port-au-Prince, respectively (see Thomas, this issue). Brent Crosson's (2020) updating of the study of Afro-Caribbean religious traditions in light of post-Asadian discussions of secularism belong in that picture, as does Stuart Strange's (2018) explorations of Ndyuka "metaphysics of history" and affliction, or Anthony Medina's (2020) dissertation on Cuban "pandillas"-i.e., criminalized Black male associations (which Medina carefully disentangles from both the image of U.S. "gangs" and Central American "maras")-that can be profitably read together with Jovan Lewis's (2020) ethnography of Jamaican online scammers.…”