Seminar: "Hurricane Riskcapes, Repair and Post-disaster futures in the Caribbean: Only In Person" - Kevon Rhiney
Landscape Architecture Seminar
Kevon Rhiney is an Associate Professor of Geography at Rutgers University and Director of the Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow for the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES) at the University of the West Indies. Current research explores the intersection of climate change, development, and justice, focusing on how historically marginalized communities in the Caribbean and Central America navigate climate-linked socio-ecological shocks. This talk traces recent hurricane relief and rebuilding efforts in the Caribbean to demonstrate how disaster recovery has become a highly contested and political terrain. I reflect on my ongoing work in the eastern Caribbean, and a growing regional body of critical disaster scholarship, to demonstrate how disaster recovery efforts intersect with issues around race, coloniality and land-based struggles. I situate regional discourses on climate change and climate justice within a broader politico-cultural context that foregrounds the current climate crisis as an extension of a colonial past that continues to shape the region’s subordinate position in an uneven world system. A situation that illustrates how the Caribbean’s disproportionate vulnerability to the adverse effects of a changing climate cannot be separated from the historical conditions and logics that brought about the contemporary world and Western modernity. I close by offering insights into island ‘survivalism’ within a context of growing global climate uncertainty and ongoing post/colonial struggles. In resituating mainstream discourses on the Anthropocene from the purview of the Caribbean, I hope to raise critical questions regarding the political, historical, and onto-epistemic assumptions/logics that undergird contemporary debates around the global climate crisis and its attendant solutions. I draw from decolonial scholarship and the Black Radical Tradition, to develop a basis for using catastrophe as a foundational starting point to theorize, resist and imagine radically new worlds and ways of being amidst the enduring conditions brought on by irreversible climate-linked losses.