Caribbean Archipelagos and Mainlands

Abstract

I n the Caribbean region, an archipelago that Edouard Glissant once described as “fissured by histories,” resilience has been wrought out of the ebb and flow of intellectual and physical currents that have moved peoples and ideas across the sea, its islands, and continental shores. Given its colonial foundations and postcolonial vicissitudes, Caribbean reality has always been protean, hybrid, mercurial—a fluid ecology in endless dynamic transformation—yet one rooted in a geographic environment and in socioeconomic configurations determined by shared historical markers: a fateful European encounter, the Middle Passage and the triangular Atlantic trade, slavery, the plantation, a troublesome economic dependence on tourism, the slow violence of environmental mismanagement, never-ending cycles of diasporan departures and returns. For the nations sharing the archipelago, where no place or person is ever very distant from the sea, resilience—“the magnitude of shock the system can absorb and remain within a given state ... and the degree to which the system can build capacity for learning and adaptation”—has been elusive and contested, particularly now as the region faces the threats that come from rapidly changing environmental conditions that are the result of climate change. For the region, the threat of climate change —the product of global conditions it has had little role in producing—manifests itself in three very specific and immediate forms: rising sea levels, looming biodiversity losses, and an increase in the frequency and intensity of hurricanes. These threats challenge our understanding of the meaning of resilience, raising questions about “the magnitude of shock” our ecologies and populations can absorb and survive, and the degree to which they can continue to adapt and thrive in rapidly changing circumstances. These circumstances deeply exacerbate the archipelago’s already serious challenges, the product of centuries of exploitative extractivist colonial practices that assessed the region’s natural and human resources solely in terms of their value as commodities for production and exportation. RobNixon, in Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011), has offered us a guide to understanding how the slow violence perpetrated on Caribbean islands as “resource extraction nations”—a violence he defines as one that “occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all”— has compromised the region’s environmental health and, by definition, its capacity for rebounding. In the discourse of Caribbean resilience, Haiti has emerged as a symbol of a nation in environmental crisis, an ecological revenant warning of the direst consequences facing Caribbean nations not engaging in a concerted effort to reverse ecological degradation and biodiversity collapse. The concern is not misplaced, as in spaces as