The Infrastructures of Liberation at the End of the World: A Reflection on Disaster in the Caribbean

Abstract:Looking ethnographically at the 2018 flooding of Greenvale Park, Trinidad, and in conversation with disasters and their aftershocks throughout the region, this essay explores the entanglements of crisis, loss, and liberation. Drawing on the grassroot responses to recent not-sonatural crisis events as evidence, it shows that repetitive states of coconstituted ecological and political-economic devastation create vivid spaces of loss that make clear to the affected that repeating states of dystopia cannot be ruptured by the reiteration of the past political visions of nation-states. Finally, the essay suggests that our apocalyptic present makes the case for an abolitionist praxis to intentionally end this world that singularly values Man2 /homo oeconomicus to save ourselves as a species.