Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession, disasters, justice, and repair across the Caribbean archipelago

Abstract

The Caribbean region has been (re)shaped by colonial transformations of Amerindian ecologies, enslavement of Africans, and Indenture of Asians on plantations designed for European profit. Yet longstanding practices of resistance to human­–environmental domination and ecocidal violence have enabled Caribbean people to (re)create and sustain affirmative socio-ecologies. This report reflects on four axes characterizing the contestations over Caribbean environmental geographies: resistance to extractivism and dispossession, denaturalization of disaster, theorizing global ecological justice, and pursuit of repair. The article suggests how Caribbean environmental philosophy and ecocriticism offer analytics for mapping relational geographies beyond Western epistemes of progress and spatial imaginaries that peripheralize the region.