An interdisciplinary exploration of how Puerto Ricans imagine repair, recovery, and decolonial futures amid disaster, austerity, and colonial constraint
In the wake of hurricanes, earthquakes, and fiscal collapse, Puerto Ricans have confronted the limits of state-led reconstruction and the rise of post-disaster speculation. 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 to examine how disaster recovery can both reinforce existing hierarchies of power and open pathways toward transformation.
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, contributors explore themes ranging from energy justice and housing displacement to memory, migration, and artistic practice. They show how the ruins of colonial modernity—its failed infrastructures and broken promises—can be sources of solidarity and imagination.
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“This volume invites readers to participate in the speculative labor of Borifuturism no matter where they call home. It invites us to collectively imagine a post-disaster future where displacement is not a permanent threat, where rights are protected, where cultural memory is a valued resource, and where families are not divided by imperial borders. It does not offer a blueprint or guarantee—only an opening, a proposition, a glimpse at what might be possible if we dare to imagine otherwise.” —from the Introduction by Yarimar Bonilla
Other books edited by Yarimar Bonilla and Isabel Guzzardo Tamargo
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Las Réplicas del Desastre
Edited by Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón -
Aftershocks of Disaster
Edited by Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón