Climate Transformation, Racial De/Formation, Guyana

Sarah Vaughn’s Engineering Vulnerability: In Pursuit of Climate Adaptation is a vital contribution to anthropological conversations about how climate transformation is contouring everyday and infrastructural life—particularly in postcolonial places, where the built environment may layer uneven histories of settler colonialism, international developmentalist intervention, and, in some cases, the ameliorative attempts of coalitional multiracial governments to undo hierarchies of precarity structured by the legacies of colonialism and racism. Vaughn’s story is set in Guyana, where since 2005—the year of a disastrous flooding event—coastal engineering projects have been inaugurated with increasing urgency, aiming to adapt to today’s increased probabilities of inundation, both from the sea (sea-level rise) and from the overflow of rivers. At the center of the tale Vaughn tells is the question of how a national Guyanese political imagination draws from as well as shapes the deployment of hydrological-technological expertise, formatting how the climate vulnerability of ordinary people is inhabited and evaluated. The book offers a sharp ethnographic and archivally informed examination of how hydraulic and hydrological engineers seek to counter and contain coastal erosion on this South American/ Caribbean country’s Atlantic coast—and inways thatmight help unsettle existing hierarchies of precarity, often scaffolded by racial division. “Settlement” is a key word in this text, referring both to legacies of Dutch and British settler-colonial endeavors and to today’s work to render the Guyanese coast livable for the range of the nation’s citizens. Vaughn makes clear that projects of coastal adaptation have been settlement projects. But she also urges that not all settlement is settler colonialism. She writes that climate adaptation demands “analysis on its own terms, as a large-scale project that alters understandings of settlement or the multilayered processes that contribute to dwelling and the habitation of a place” (1–2). Combating climate vulnerability often entails planning for and shoring up projects of settlement— both as dwelling and as coming to provisional social compacts. Vaughn is interested in the politics of race in Guyana and in how these interdigitate with coastal adaptation plans. She is keen to resist a kind of off-the-shelf account that would look for evidence that dominated racial groups are simply and linearly pushed to dangerous and neglected marginal geographies and are therefore subject to more environmental vulnerability than other groups. Rather, she shows how the very specific ethnoracial constitution of Guyana (“43.5 percent Indian, 30 percent African, 16.7 percent Mixed Race, 9.2 Amerindian, and less than 1 percent Portuguese, Chinese, or European” [6], according to her citation of the 2002 census)—the layered result of histories of triangle trade slavery, indentured Asian servitude, Dutch and British colonialism, and postindependence alliances as well as rifts between Indo-Guyanese and Afro-Guyanese politicians—has made class and race vulnerabilities mobile and molten. In a brilliant framing, Vaughn juxtaposes the peaty soils of Guyana (known in Creole as pegasse)—ever moving and turning as well as shaping and interfering with engineering and embankment structures—to the Guyanese racial formation of apaan jatt (“a Bhojpuri-Hindi phrase loosely translated into Creolese as ‘vote for your own kind’ ” [4]), which may look at first glance like a hard-and-fast rule for social segmentation along lines of race. Vaughn argues, however, that apaan jatt in practice may be just as shape-shifting as pegasse, and her empirical material and analytic interpretations of facts on the Guyanese (shifting) ground well support her claim that we need a kind of counterracial optic to understand the flexing facts of who becomes climate vulnerable when, where, and how (in other words, not all climate racial politics are templated by Hurricane Katrina). Her call for counterracial thinking, to be clear, is not a call for color blindness or postracialism but rather a call to continue to de-essentialize, to deuniversalize, what can count as the forces that produce embodied social difference and inequality in geopolitical space. She calls this thinking “an ethico-political stance whereby people simultaneously acknowledge race while creating distance from it in order to imagine a new, or at least different, kind of engagement with the planet” (23). Climate adaptation, she holds, “reflects people’s ongoing efforts to square race with the active force of ‘the past’ lingering as memory, legacy, deferral, nostalgia, and burden” (21). Think of this, with apologies to Omi and Winant’s (2015) racial formation, as a kind of racial deformation. The book is dedicated to tracking social forms and unforms, charting an intersectional political ecology in motion. The book holds seven vivid chapters. Vaughn attends to the deep history of sugar plantation infrastructure—polder and irrigation canal networks created under Dutch and British colonialism—that preexists contemporary settlement logistics, an infrastructure that has echo effects on today’s coastal planning. She documents how mid-twentieth-century independence movements set up collaborations as well as frictions between Afroand Indo-Guyanese populations, with one later result being that