Mimi Sheller. Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity.

Infrastructuring Urban Futures

“…My studies of historical popular democratic movements and public claim-making in Jamaica and Haiti in the 19th century (Sheller, 2000(Sheller, , 2012 sensitize me to the subaltern politics of contesting exclusionary citizenship regimes in the post-slavery Caribbean. Likewise, wider work on the histories of US relations of extraction with the Caribbean region (Sheller, 2003(Sheller, , 2014 demonstrate the exploitation of Caribbean land and people for the benefit of the Global North. While Jamaica, Haiti, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic and Cuba have experienced very different forms of (dis)connectivity and incorporation into the international system, differing patterns of urbanization, and varied ways of building and governing infrastructure systems, in each case there have been struggles for radical reconstruction and reparations to address the deep-seated coloniality and denial of citizenship, including infrastructural citizenship.…”

“…In the following sections I will focus on two moments and tactics of infrastructural reparations -in de Certeau's sense (1984) as also picked up by -in Caribbean cities experiencing periods of natural disaster, political conflict and states of emergency: Port-au-Prince, Haiti, after the 2010 earthquake and ongoing political turbulence since; and San Juan, Puerto Rico, caught in both the sudden disaster of Hurricane Maria in 2017 and the ongoing slow disaster of coloniality, debt and austerity. Caribbean cities have deep ties to the Global North -indeed were central in the making of Northern urbanization (Sheller, 2003(Sheller, , 2014 -and I would argue cannot be thought of or theorized outside of the global infrastructures of (dis)connectivity. These include the background physical infrastructure of sea lanes, air space, fossil fuel and communication infrastructures such as undersea cables and satellites (all of which are ultimately subject to US military power in the Caribbean), as well as crucial financial infrastructures and software for internet connectivity used for 'offshoring' various kinds of data-based service work such as the offshore banking sector, call centres or internet-based services (Freeman, 2000;Lewis, 2020).…”

AlterNative Archipelagos and the 1952 Caribbean Festival: Musical Mobilities Escaping ALCOA’s Extractive Tourism

“…Underlying the mobilities of tourists, though, were the mobilities of ALCOA's freight ships, picking up bauxite from mines in the region or alumina from its refineries to be smelted into aluminum in United States smelters, which fed the metal into the massive military build-up and consumer markets that supported global United States imperialism in the mid-twentieth century. 7 ALCOA was an empire-building company, promoting archipelagic travel through the Caribbean as an ancillary benefit of their vast aluminum empire, premised on the military network of US Navy war ships and bases throughout the region. ALCOA hired leading graphic artist James Bingham to depict the musical performances of each island in the archipelago for its advertising campaigns, while sending top sound recording producers to the Caribbean to capture the music of the region, probably during the Caribbean Festival.…”

Entangled Future Im/mobilities

“…As such, it tackles already existing mobilities -those of robotic machines sent to other planets -as they foreshadow dreams about and techno-optimist projects concerning future human mobilities to outer space. We read Lubrin's "Voodoo Hypothesis" as a poetic articulation of the post/colonial entanglements of space travel as a material and technological praxis dependent on the exploitation of Black land and labor, e.g., in the aluminum industry (Sheller 2014). The poem is concerned with both the materialities of outer space mobilities as well as with reflections on colonial conquests throughout global history and racist technologies dehumanizing Black bodies by means of their objectification.…”