Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World

Cover
Title page
Copyright page
Contents
Table of Ships
Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Prologue A Colonial and Environmental Double Fracture: The Caribbean at the Heart of the Modern Tempest
	A modern tempest
	Noah’s ark or the colonial and environmental double fracture
	The slave ship or modernity’s hold
	A world-ship: the world as a horizon for ecology
	Reaching the eye of the tempest
Part I The Modern Tempest Environmental Violence and Colonial Ruptures
1  Colonial Inhabitation: An Earth without a World
	Principles of colonial inhabitation: geography, exploitation of nature, and othercide
	Foundations of colonial inhabitation: land grabs, massacres, and land clearing
	Forms of colonial inhabitation: private property, plantations, and slavery
2  The Matricides of the Plantationocene
	The end of a nourishing earth: from conucos to plantations
	The ecumenal rupture: a “land-without-manman”
	Ruptures in the landscape, biodiversity, and metabolic exchange
	From colonial inhabitation to the Plantationocene
3  The Hold and the Negrocene
	Hold politics
	The refusal of the world
	Destruction of community ties and affiliations
	Loss of body, loss of Earth
	Off-polis: the engineering of a non-political being
	The specificity of the condition of enslaved Negresses
	The Negrocene
4  The Colonial Hurricane
	The colonial hurricane
	Shakespeare and Césaire: when the tempest serves the masters’ interests
	Conrad and Katrina: when the tempest creates the world’s holds
	Turner and the Zong: the pretext-tempest for throwing the world overboard
	The politics of the colonial hurricane and global warming
Part II Noah’s Ark: When Environmentalism Refuses the World
5  Noah’s Ark: Boarding, or the Abandonment of the World
	Noah’s ark: an imaginary of environmentalist discourse
	Boarding politics
	Loss-bodies
	Astronauts on Earth
	Abandoning the world: the Noahs
	Figures of the world’s refusal
6  Reforestation without the World (Haiti)
	Technocentric discourse and the off-world
	Unjustly blaming Maroons and peasants
	Reforestation without the world; or, the sacrifice of peasants
	The parc de la Visite massacre of July 23rd, 2012
	At the origin: colonial inhabitation and the Maroon fracture of the world
	World-making to reforest the Earth
7  Paradise or Hell in the Nature Preserves (Puerto Rico)
	Paradise: a colonial laboratory
	Vieques: paradisiacal nature reserve or hell
	Colonial heterotopia
	The violence of the blank page
8  The Masters’ Chemistry (Martinique and Guadeloupe)
	The toxic condition of the Plantationocene
	Chlordecone in the French Antilles: toxic forms of violence and domination
	A toxic power grab that strengthens colonial inhabitation
	The masters’ chemistry and the lie of an astronaut-humanity
9  A Colonial Ecology: At the Heart of the Double Fracture
	Slave-making ecology: environmentalism under the condition of slavery
	Plantationary emancipation: an abolition of slavery on the condition of the plantation
	A fracture between anticolonialism and modern environmentalism
	The Anthropocene’s colonial oikos
	The Negroes of the colonial oikos
	The Anthropocene’s hold
Part III The Slave Ship: Rising Up from Modernity’s Hold in Search of a World
10  The Slave Ship: Debarking Off-World
	The slave ship: the imaginary ark of the Caribbean world
	Debarkation politics
	Lost bodies
	The shipwrecked: off-Earth
	The Negro: off-world
	Figures of the flight from the world: rising up from the hold
11  Maroon Ecology: Fleeing the Plantationocene
	Marooning the Anthropocene
	At the heart of modernity’s double fracture
	Touching Earth: Maroon matrigenesis
	Creole metamorphosis: recovering a self, discovering a body
	The Maroon’s ecology: protectors of the forests
	The Maroonesses
	Limits and virtues
12  Rousseau, Thoreau, and Civil Marronage
	John Muir in Cuba: breaking the wall of environmentalism
	Rousseau or the Maroon walker
	Thoreau cut in two
	Thoreau, defender of the Maroons
	The enslaved to Black enslavement: the other people enslaved by the Plantationocene
	Civil marronage
	Civil Maroonesses and the White women against slavery
	A civil marronage from the Plantationocene
13  A Decolonial Ecology: Rising Up from the Hold
	From the colonial fracture to the environmental fracture
	From the environmental fracture to the colonial fracture
	Unsettling the Anthropocene: the Ayiti hypothesis
	Decolonial ecology’s struggles: rising up from the modern hold
Part IV A World-Ship: World-Making beyond the Double Fracture
14  A World-Ship: Politics of Encounter
	Noah’s ark and the slave ship: two wanderings of the same modernity
	The environmentalist return: continuing the colonial refusal of the world
	Maroon returns: pursuit of the infinite flight from the world
	Politics of encounter and the world-ship
15  Forming a Body in the World: Reconnecting with a Mother-Earth
	The fracture of the two bodies
	The bellies of the world and the wombs of the Earth
	Healing Negro bodies and ecological bodies
	Blowing the conch and playing the drum
16  Interspecies Alliances: The Animal Cause and the Negro Cause
	The enslavement of non-human animals
	The social and political animalization of Black and other racialized people
	Being prey in the concrete jungle
	Racism and the animalization of women
	One slave-making inhabitation of the Earth
	Interspecies alliances against the Plantationocene
17  A Worldly-Ecology: On the Bridge of Justice
	World-making, composing with pluralities
	Beyond gestalt ontology and creolization
	For doubly relational aesthetics and writing
	For a cosmopolitics of relation
	On the bridge of justice: climate justice, reparations, and decolonial restitutions
Epilogue: World-Making in the Face of the Tempest
	World-making
	The intrusion of Ayiti
	Recovering the sun of Africa
Notes
	Prologue
	Chapter 1 Colonial Inhabitation
	Chapter 2 The Matricides of the Plantationocene
	Chapter 3 The Hold and the Negrocene
	Chapter 4 The Colonial Hurricane
	Chapter 5 Noah’s Ark
	Chapter 6 Reforestation without the World
	Chapter 7 Paradise or Hell in the Nature Reserves
	Chapter 8 The Masters’ Chemistry
	Chapter 9 A Colonial Ecology
	Chapter 10 The Slave Ship
	Chapter 11 Maroon Ecology
	Chapter 12 Rousseau, Thoreau, and Civil Marronage
	Chapter 13 A Decolonial Ecology
	Chapter 14 A World-Ship
	Chapter 15 Forming a Body in the World
	Chapter 16 Interspecies Alliances
	Chapter 17 A Worldly-Ecology
	Epilogue
Index
EULA