Reconstructing the citizen: Disaster, citizenship, and expertise in racial Guyana

Abstract

This article examines the interlocking of nature and race within the overarching framework of the turn toward an idiom of ‘preparedness’ in disaster expertise in Guyana. Tracking the question of racial insecurity following disastrous floods in 2005, the article discusses disaster preparedness interventions as working against the country’s process toward postsocialist racial democratization. In this respect, disaster preparedness has had contradictory effects on security and has enacted a sort of public critique and humor about its inaptness. On the basis of this ethnographic case, the article argues that a practice and language of preparedness is as much about technocratic know-how as it is a style of political humor itself. In this theorization, preparedness is more than contingent, and so is a necessary temporal moment in which people work to imagine a new relationship to nature in recognition of their everyday life molded to environmental and racial-political vulnerability.

Waiting for the flood: technocratic time and impending disaster in the Himalayas

“…This rhythm of technocratic time also had implications for Zanskarpas' sense of control over the impending disaster. As Sarah Vaughn (2012) points out, preparedness is a temporal moment characterised by the governance of expertise and the management of citizens, which may lead to exclusionary practices of citizenship. Zanskarpas experienced the state's disaster preparedness and mitigation efforts as tools of oppression that subjected them to the process of waiting.…”

Children, citizenship and crisis: towards a participatory agenda

“…Seen as ruptures in the social fabric of everyday life (Nolas 2015), crises appear as revelatory moments (Solway 1994). Before-after ruptures can reveal, on a brutal scale, the pre-existing unequal social ties between individuals and groups (Vaughn 2012). Divides between privileged vs. deprived, dominant vs. dominated, protected vs. vulnerable groups emerge in their full strength.…”

Disappearing Mangroves: The Epistemic Politics of Climate Adaptation in Guyana

“…These conversations unfold within a national context in which sea defense has been continuously made over by external agents-be these mudbanks, colonizers, donor organizations, or the sea. To be sure, these conversations have broader implications for environmental justice, particularly as disasters loom that blur contestations over social and environmental forms of citizenship (Vaughn 2012). Inverse performativity thus occurs not only within rarified domains of government science but also across other sectors of society, as the experiences of beekeepers with the GMRP indicate.…”