Post-Disaster Futures

An interdisciplinary exploration of how Puerto Ricans are redefining futurity in defiance of imperial violence and infrastructural collapseIn the wake of hurricanes, earthquakes, and fiscal collapse, Puerto Ricans have confronted the limits of state-led reconstruction and the rise of disaster capitalism. At the same time, they have forged new community-based experiments in self-governance, collective care, and imaginative practice.Post-Disaster Futures brings together scholars, artists, and activists. Moving between the archipelago and its diaspora, the volume traces a collective effort to rethink what repair means when the very institutions of recovery and governance perpetuate the damage they claim to fix. Through essays, interviews, poetry, and conversations, the contributors explore themes ranging from energy justice and housing displacement to memory, migration, and artistic practice. Collectively, they show how the ruins of colonial modernity can be sources of solidarity and imagination.

Yarimar Bonilla is a professor at Princeton University’s Effron Center for the Study of America, as well as an award-winning filmmaker and contributor for New York Times Opinion. She is the author and editor of multiple books including Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment and Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm.Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo is an assistant professor of literatures of the Americas in the English Department at Seton Hall University. She has published articles and reviews in Small Axe, 80 Grados, Confluencia, and beyond. She is also a principal collaborator of the Puerto Rico Syllabus and an editor of The Puerto Rico Review.