Elizabeth DeLoughrey
University of California, Los Angeles, English, Faculty Member
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Maori literature, Pacific Island Studies, Caribbean Literature, Caribbean Studies, Ecocriticism and Ecofeminism, Ecocriticism, and 43 moreIndigenous Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Environmental Philosophy, World Literatures, English, Human Geography, Climate Change, Ethics, Post-Colonialism, Cultural Geography, Fredric Jameson, Novel, Anthropocene, Anthropocene studies, Militarism, Militarism and militarization, Maori Studies, Maori Art, Pacific Islands, Pacific Islands art, Caribbean art, Hispanic Caribbean Literature and Arts, Art and Climate Change, Environmental Studies, Environmental Humanities, Postcolonial Literature, Postcolonial Theory, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, Indigenous Politics, Space and Place, World-Ecology, Maritime and Oceanic History, Oceanic art, Ocean acidification, Blue Humanities, Culture and the Anthropocene, Art and the Anthropocene, Anthropocene Theory, Nuclear Anthropocene, The Anthropocene, Climate Fiction, Speculative Fiction, and Literature of the Anglophone Caribbean edit
In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how Indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry,... more
In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how Indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature. In these works, authors and artists use allegory as a means to understand the multiscalar complexities of the Anthropocene and to critique the violence of capitalism, militarism, and the postcolonial state. DeLoughrey examines the work of a wide range of artists and writers—including poets Kamau Brathwaite and Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner, Dominican installation artist Tony Capellán, and authors Keri Hulme and Erna Brodber—whose work addresses Caribbean plantations, irradiated Pacific atolls, global flows of waste, and allegorical representations of the ocean and the island. In examining how island writers and artists address the experience of finding themselves at the forefront of the existential threat posed by climate change, DeLoughrey demonstrates how the Anthropocene and empire are mutually constitutive and establishes the vital importance of allegorical art and literature in understanding our global environmental crisis.
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Indigenous Studies, New Zealand Studies, Pacific Island Studies, Island Studies, Caribbean Literature, and 10 moreCaribbean Studies, Environmental Humanities, Anthropocene studies, Pacific Islands, Anthropocene, Maori, Latin America and the Caribbean, Blue Humanities, Culture and the Anthropocene, and Islands and Archipelagos
This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to the representation... more
This book examines current trends in scholarly thinking about the new field of the Environmental Humanities, focusing in particular on how the history of globalization and imperialism represents a special challenge to the representation of environmental issues. Essays in this path-breaking collection examine the role that narrative, visual, and aesthetic forms can play in drawing attention to and shaping our ideas about long-term and catastrophic environmental challenges such as climate change, militarism, deforestation, the pollution and management of the global commons, petrocapitalism, and the commodification of nature.
The volume presents a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Australasia and the Pacific, as well as North America, the volume includes essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars, providing vital new interdisciplinary perspectives on: the politics of the earth; disaster, vulnerability, and resilience; political ecologies and environmental justice; world ecologies; and the Anthropocene. In engaging critical ecologies, the volume poses a postcolonial environmental humanities for the twenty-first century. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.
The volume presents a postcolonial approach to the environmental humanities, especially in conjunction with current thinking in areas such as political ecology and environmental justice. Spanning regions such as Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, Australasia and the Pacific, as well as North America, the volume includes essays by founding figures in the field as well as new scholars, providing vital new interdisciplinary perspectives on: the politics of the earth; disaster, vulnerability, and resilience; political ecologies and environmental justice; world ecologies; and the Anthropocene. In engaging critical ecologies, the volume poses a postcolonial environmental humanities for the twenty-first century. At the heart of this is a conviction that a thoroughly global, postcolonial, and comparative approach is essential to defining the emergent field of the environmental humanities, and that this field has much to offer in understanding critical issues surrounding the creation of alternative ecological futures.
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Indigenous Studies, Southeast Asian Studies, Climate Change, Australian Studies, Pacific Island Studies, and 26 morePostcolonial Studies, Political Ecology, Disaster Studies, Frankfurt School (Philosophy), Militarism, African Literature, Caribbean Studies, Ecology, Globalization And Postcolonial Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Postcolonial Literature, Ecocriticism, Environmental Justice, Environmental Humanities, Ecological Humanities, Material Ecocriticism, Anthropocene, Political Ecology, New Environmentalism , Green Economy and New Global Shift, Postcolonial Ecocriticism, World-Ecology, Buen vivir, Petrofiction, Ecocritical Theory, The Anthropocene, Maori Studies, and Postcolonialism
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The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing... more
The first edited collection to bring ecocritical studies into a necessary dialogue with postcolonial literature, this volume offers rich and suggestive ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others, Postcolonial Ecologies makes a remarkable contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues.
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Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean. Theorists such as Edouard Glissant argue that the dialectic... more
Perhaps there is no other region in the world that has been more radically altered in terms of human and botanic migration, transplantation, and settlement than the Caribbean. Theorists such as Edouard Glissant argue that the dialectic between Caribbean "nature" and "culture," engendered by this unique and troubled history, has not heretofore been brought into productive relation. Caribbean Literature and the Environment redresses this omission by gathering together eighteen essays that consider the relationship between human and natural history. The result is the first volume to examine the literatures of the Caribbean from an ecocritical perspective in all language areas of the region.
In its exploration of the relationship between nature and culture, this collection focuses on four overlapping themes: how Caribbean texts inscribe the environmental impact of colonial and plantation economies; how colonial myths of edenic and natural origins are revisioned; what the connections are between histories of biotic and cultural creolization; and how a Caribbean aesthetics might usefully articulate a means to preserve sustainability in the context of tourism and globalization. By creating a dialogue between the growing field of ecological literary studies, which has primarily been concerned with white settler narratives, and Caribbean cultural production, especially the region’s negotiation of complex racial and ethnic legacies, these essays explore the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.
The volume includes an extensive introduction by the editors and essays by Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, Trenton Hickman, Shona Jackson, LeGrace Benson, Jana Evans Braziel, George B. Handley, Renee K. Grossman, Isabel Hoving, Natasha Tinsley, Helen Tiffen, Hena Maes-Jelinek, Heidi Bojsen, Ineke Phaf-Reinberger, Eric Prieto, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, as well as interviews with Walcott and Raphaël Confiant. It will appeal to all those interested in Caribbean, literary, and ecocritical studies.
In its exploration of the relationship between nature and culture, this collection focuses on four overlapping themes: how Caribbean texts inscribe the environmental impact of colonial and plantation economies; how colonial myths of edenic and natural origins are revisioned; what the connections are between histories of biotic and cultural creolization; and how a Caribbean aesthetics might usefully articulate a means to preserve sustainability in the context of tourism and globalization. By creating a dialogue between the growing field of ecological literary studies, which has primarily been concerned with white settler narratives, and Caribbean cultural production, especially the region’s negotiation of complex racial and ethnic legacies, these essays explore the ways in which the history of transplantation and settlement has provided unique challenges and opportunities for establishing a sense of place and an environmental ethic in the Caribbean.
The volume includes an extensive introduction by the editors and essays by Antonio Benítez-Rojo, Derek Walcott, Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen, Trenton Hickman, Shona Jackson, LeGrace Benson, Jana Evans Braziel, George B. Handley, Renee K. Grossman, Isabel Hoving, Natasha Tinsley, Helen Tiffen, Hena Maes-Jelinek, Heidi Bojsen, Ineke Phaf-Reinberger, Eric Prieto, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, as well as interviews with Walcott and Raphaël Confiant. It will appeal to all those interested in Caribbean, literary, and ecocritical studies.
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While a body of earlier work on the Black Atlantic generally imagined the ocean as a backdrop for primarily heteronormative, masculine human agents to move from one continent to another, this westward telos has been complicated by a... more
While a body of earlier work on the Black Atlantic generally
imagined the ocean as a backdrop for primarily heteronormative,
masculine human agents to move from one continent to another,
this westward telos has been complicated by a deeper
engagement with Black queer intimacies and non-human kinship
relations in the depths of the ocean. A recent novella written by
Rivers Solomon with their collaborative interlocuters from the
band “clipping.” – Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan
Snipes – portrays the fluidity of an aqueous merfolk named the
wajinru who are born of the dead and nursed and nourished as
kin by non-human figures of what Edouard Glissant terms the
“womb abyss.” Here I explore The Deep as speculative fiction that
speaks directly to questions of oceanic origins and ontologies,
transforming the necropolitics of transatlantic slave trading into
the possibilities of the “womb abyss” for the lives of its
“aquatically mutated,” non-binary descendants.
imagined the ocean as a backdrop for primarily heteronormative,
masculine human agents to move from one continent to another,
this westward telos has been complicated by a deeper
engagement with Black queer intimacies and non-human kinship
relations in the depths of the ocean. A recent novella written by
Rivers Solomon with their collaborative interlocuters from the
band “clipping.” – Daveed Diggs, William Hutson, and Jonathan
Snipes – portrays the fluidity of an aqueous merfolk named the
wajinru who are born of the dead and nursed and nourished as
kin by non-human figures of what Edouard Glissant terms the
“womb abyss.” Here I explore The Deep as speculative fiction that
speaks directly to questions of oceanic origins and ontologies,
transforming the necropolitics of transatlantic slave trading into
the possibilities of the “womb abyss” for the lives of its
“aquatically mutated,” non-binary descendants.
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Cultural Studies, Black Studies Or African American Studies, Black/African Diaspora, Queer Theory (Literature), Environmental Humanities, and 12 moreHuman-Nonhuman Assemblages, Atlantic Studies, Black Death, Kinship, Literary studies, Edouard Glissant, Science Fiction Studies, Historical Studies, Science Fiction/Speculative Fiction, Blue Humanities, critical oceanic studies, and Rivers Solomon
The first half of this article draws from the keynote lecture delivered by Joyce Pualani Warren in which she theorizes an Indigenous Pacific conception of origins that encompasses notions of Blackness and kinship. Warren argues that using... more
The first half of this article draws from the keynote lecture delivered by Joyce Pualani Warren in which she theorizes an Indigenous Pacific conception of origins that encompasses notions of Blackness and kinship. Warren argues that using knowledge of Pō can offer a model of kinship and enhanced support for Indigeneity and Indigenous futures. The second half of this article features Warren’s response to questions and prompts posed by Keith L. Camacho, Elizabeth DeLoughrey, and Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi.
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s of 500 words or original papers of 25-35 pages in length are being solicited for a proposed festschrift honoring Derek Walcott on the occasion of his 75th birthday, January 2005. Submissions will be accepted through May 2003. The... more
s of 500 words or original papers of 25-35 pages in length are being solicited for a proposed festschrift honoring Derek Walcott on the occasion of his 75th birthday, January 2005. Submissions will be accepted through May 2003. The editors seek essays addressing specific poems, plays, collections (especially those that have received little attention). Editors also encourage broader theses on techniques, themes, motifs, and social, literary, and linguistic influences concomitant with Walcott's New World milieu. Manuscripts in MLA style may be mailed to Robert Hamner,
This paper examines the recent oceanic turn in the humanities, particularly what French theorist Gaston Bachelard once termed the “depth imagination” and argues that it has been reconstituted by a new era of extraction, in both material... more
This paper examines the recent oceanic turn in the humanities, particularly what French theorist Gaston Bachelard once termed the “depth imagination” and argues that it has been reconstituted by a new era of extraction, in both material and imaginary terms. Marine biologist Sylvia Earle reminds us of the true value of ‘extraction’ as the possibility of species being. Extraction is also about futurity, narrative, technology, and speculation. Here I stage an interdisciplinary conversation between recent scholarship about the speculative practices of Deep Sea Mining (DSM) and speculative fiction (sf) that imagines techno-utopian futures of human life under the sea. In doing so I raise questions about the ways in which particular kinds of literary genres and reading practices produce an extractive imaginary, and examine the uncomfortable neoliberal overlap between the concept of innovation as a driver of the blue economy as well as the emergent field of the blue humanities.
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003205173/laws-sea-irus-braverman
https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003205173/laws-sea-irus-braverman
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Over three decades ago, Sylvia Wynter argued in her article “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” (1971) that models of Caribbean history and literature could be understood in the racial, economic, and cultural divisions between the... more
Over three decades ago, Sylvia Wynter argued in her article “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation” (1971) that models of Caribbean history and literature could be understood in the racial, economic, and cultural divisions between the master’s plantation on the one hand and the slaves' provision grounds on the other. Although Wynter's insights into the spatial geographies of Caribbean culture have been largely overlooked, they have tremendous relevance to the ways in which scholars excavate Caribbean history and the ‘ground’ on which cultural archeology is conducted. In this paper, I explore Wynter’s ideas on the ways in which the violence of modernity alienated humans from nature and the implications of this alienation for the Caribbean novel. Wynter has already employed this tension between plantation and provision ground in her analysis of Vic Reid’s New Day (1949) but I’d like to explore how this model might work by considering Wynter’s first and only novel, The Hills o...
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... Finding References. Review policy. Email this article (Login required). Email the author (Login required). About The Author Elizabeth DeLoughrey. ... "The litany of islands, The rosary of archipelagoes": Caribbean... more
... Finding References. Review policy. Email this article (Login required). Email the author (Login required). About The Author Elizabeth DeLoughrey. ... "The litany of islands, The rosary of archipelagoes": Caribbean and Pacific Archipelagraphy. Elizabeth DeLoughrey. Full Text: PDF. ...
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1. Militarisation is something of a proverbial elephant in the room when considering the once and current course of empire. When Pacific militarisation has been examined, the focus often turns to the strategic military history of World... more
1. Militarisation is something of a proverbial elephant in the room when considering the once and current course of empire. When Pacific militarisation has been examined, the focus often turns to the strategic military history of World War II or draws on an unreconstructed area studies, uncritically complicit with development and its methods of being realised. The Pacific Islands are therefore at both the centre and the margins of any reckoning with the colonial and neocolonial history of state violence in the region. The authors in this volume call for a critical militarisation studies (CMS); one that weaves the complex histories of state violence in the region in relation to issues of ethnicity, indigeneity, gender and sexuality. CMS also calls for scrutiny of the diversity of discourses expressed by communities complicit in regimes of militarisation as well as those articulating cultural and political modes of demilitarisation and resistance.[1] Critical militarisation studies en...
Recent scholarship in the blue humanities, or critical ocean studies, has turned to the mutable relationship between human bodies and the ocean, shifting from depictions of a seascape across which human bodies attain agency to considering... more
Recent scholarship in the blue humanities, or critical ocean studies, has turned to the mutable relationship between human bodies and the ocean, shifting from depictions of a seascape across which human bodies attain agency to considering the experience and representability of sea ontologies, wet matter, and transcorporeal engagements with the more-than-human world. This work generally focuses on a universalized ocean (as nonhuman nature) rather than a geographically and culturally specific place (as history). The authors’ work turns the visual focus from the surface to the depths, engaging with the Caribbean Sea and contemporary artists who depict a gendered oceanic intimacy and aesthetics of diffraction and submergence. Building upon the 2017 exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, curated by Tatiana Flores, this article expands the conversation from the archipelagic to the submarine, engaging “tidalectic” representations of underwater b...
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... a figurative model that is tied directly to Africa yet exceeds a singular root culture and emphasizes regeneration in the wake of violence ... Africans were able to maintain agricultural tradi-tions with crops they imported across the... more
... a figurative model that is tied directly to Africa yet exceeds a singular root culture and emphasizes regeneration in the wake of violence ... Africans were able to maintain agricultural tradi-tions with crops they imported across the Middle Passage, such as yams, ackee, gourds, and ...
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... Finding References. Review policy. Email this article (Login required). Email the author (Login required). About The Author Elizabeth DeLoughrey. ... "The litany of islands, The rosary of archipelagoes": Caribbean... more
... Finding References. Review policy. Email this article (Login required). Email the author (Login required). About The Author Elizabeth DeLoughrey. ... "The litany of islands, The rosary of archipelagoes": Caribbean and Pacific Archipelagraphy. Elizabeth DeLoughrey. Full Text: PDF. ...
In this essay I turn to a heliographic novel by Maori author James George to explore how he inscribes the modernity of the Pacific in terms of the violence of radiation ecologies, particularly through photography and the (nuclear) wars of... more
In this essay I turn to a heliographic novel by Maori author James George to explore how he inscribes the modernity of the Pacific in terms of the violence of radiation ecologies, particularly through photography and the (nuclear) wars of light. His novel Ocean Roads suggests ...
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... Finding References. Review policy. Email this article (Login required). Email the author (Login required). About The Author Elizabeth Deloughrey. ... The Spiral Temporality of Patricia Grace's "Potiki".... more
... Finding References. Review policy. Email this article (Login required). Email the author (Login required). About The Author Elizabeth Deloughrey. ... The Spiral Temporality of Patricia Grace's "Potiki". Elizabeth Deloughrey. Full Text: PDF. Refbacks. There are currently no refbacks. ...
This article examines some of the different mappings of the globe by ecocritics and postcolonalists and the role of militarization as a constitutive part of both globalization and planetary thought. It discusses the historical connection... more
This article examines some of the different mappings of the globe by ecocritics and postcolonalists and the role of militarization as a constitutive part of both globalization and planetary thought. It discusses the historical connection between ecological thought and radioactive militarism and describes how postcolonial approaches can contribute an important critique of universalist modes of globalism. It also explores postcolonial ecocriticism’s emphasis on discourses of alterity and difference.
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This paper examines the ways in which European colonialism positioned tropical island landscapes outside the trajectories of modernity and history by segregating nature from culture, and it explores how contemporary Caribbean authors have... more
This paper examines the ways in which European colonialism positioned tropical island landscapes outside the trajectories of modernity and history by segregating nature from culture, and it explores how contemporary Caribbean authors have complicated this opposition. By tracing the ways in which island colonisation transplanted and hybridised both peoples and plants, I demonstrate how mainstream scholarship in disciplines as diverse
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... The interstices of his war-time journal thus provide the space for the creative author to weave an imaginative fabric that attests to the bravery and, after sixty years, the unimaginable sacrifice. elizabeth deloughrey Cornell... more
... The interstices of his war-time journal thus provide the space for the creative author to weave an imaginative fabric that attests to the bravery and, after sixty years, the unimaginable sacrifice. elizabeth deloughrey Cornell University * * * ...
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... by. Elizabeth Deloughrey Cornell University. American Pacificism: Oceania in the US Imagination, by Paul Lyons. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literature Series. New York: Routledge, 2006. isbn 0-415-35194-4; xii + 271 pages,... more
... by. Elizabeth Deloughrey Cornell University. American Pacificism: Oceania in the US Imagination, by Paul Lyons. Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literature Series. New York: Routledge, 2006. isbn 0-415-35194-4; xii + 271 pages, notes, bibliography, index. ...
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On the occasion of the 37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference held at the University of Miami in 2018, Elizabeth DeLoughrey reflects on the work of Sir Wilson Harris, among others , while exploring Caribbean shipscapes,... more
On the occasion of the 37th Annual West Indian Literature Conference held at the University of Miami in 2018, Elizabeth DeLoughrey reflects on the work of Sir Wilson Harris, among others , while exploring Caribbean shipscapes, particularly how the visual and literary arts imagine an "ocean of space."
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Recent scholarship in the blue humanities, or critical ocean studies, has turned to the mutable relationship between human bodies and the ocean, shifting from depictions of a seascape across which human bodies attain agency to considering... more
Recent scholarship in the blue humanities, or critical ocean studies, has turned to the mutable relationship between human bodies and the ocean, shifting from depictions of a seascape across which human bodies attain agency to considering the experience and representability of sea ontologies, wet matter, and transcorporeal engagements with the more-than-human world. This work generally focuses on a universalized ocean (as nonhuman nature) rather than a geographically and culturally specific place (as history). The authors’ work turns the visual focus from the surface to the depths, engaging with the Caribbean Sea and contemporary artists who depict a gendered oceanic intimacy and aesthetics of diffraction and submergence. Building upon the 2017 exhibition Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, curated by Tatiana Flores, this article expands the conversation from the archipelagic to the submarine, engaging “tidalectic” representations of underwater bodies through ontologies and aesthetics of diffraction. The authors consider the work of artists Tony Capellán, Jean-Ulrick Désert, María Magdalena Campos-Pons, Nadia Huggins, and David Gumbs.
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Recently, scholars have called for a "critical ocean studies" for the twenty-first century and have fathomed the oceanic depths in relationship to submarine immersions, multispecies others, feminist and Indigenous epistemologies, wet... more
Recently, scholars have called for a "critical ocean studies" for the twenty-first century and have fathomed the oceanic depths in relationship to submarine immersions, multispecies others, feminist and Indigenous epistemologies, wet ontologies, and the acidification of an Anthropocene ocean. In this scholarly turn to the ocean, the concepts of fluidity, flow, routes, and mobility have been emphasized over other, less poetic terms such as blue water navies, mobile offshore bases, high-seas exclusion zones, sea lanes of communication (SLOCs), and maritime "choke points." Yet this strategic military grammar is equally vital for a twenty-first-century critical ocean studies for the Anthropocene. Perhaps because it does not lend itself to an easy poetics, the militarization of the seas is overlooked and underrepresented in both scholarship and literature emerging from what is increasingly called the blue or oceanic humanities. This essay turns to the relationship between global climate change and the US military, particularly the Navy, and examines Indigenous challenges to the militarism of the Pacific in the poetry of Craig Santos Perez.
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I revisit Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “tidalectics” just weeks after the largest triple hurricane system on record has pummeled the Caribbean. It is an awful reminder of the permeability between land and sea, particularly in small... more
I revisit Kamau Brathwaite’s concept of “tidalectics” just weeks after the largest triple hurricane system on record has pummeled the Caribbean. It is an awful reminder of the permeability between land and sea, particularly in small islands. In this unholy trinity of Irma, José, and Maria, these mergers are violent and deadly. United Nations Secretary General António Guterres declared that Barbuda, thought to have been 90% destroyed (like Anguilla) by Hurricane Irma, became a "paradise transformed to hell." The category 5 Hurricane Maria, which destroyed the fresh water supply and infrastructure in Dominica and Puerto Rico, was thought to be the strongest Atlantic storm on record. Hurricane Irma flooded seawater as far as a third of a mile inland in Cuba. Beach sand covered the region’s major arteries, which are still unpassable in many places, weeks after the storm. Twenty-five foot waves pounded the shores, while coastal surges were measured at over six feet in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere. Due to the record-breaking levels of rain, an 11-billion gallon dam in Puerto Rico began to fail. Irma’s winds were so strong they literally pulled water out of the ocean and dried out beaches in the Bahamas and created watery bulges elsewhere. In report after eyewitness report the language to encapsulate these unprecedented violent weather events fails. Instead the language of apocalypse prevails to describe what is “catrastrophic,” “precarious,” “total devastation,” and “hell.”
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Elizabeth DeLoughrey
‘The Whole is Made up of Many:’ An Interview with Johnny Frisbie. New Literatures Review 38 (2002):
‘The Whole is Made up of Many:’ An Interview with Johnny Frisbie. New Literatures Review 38 (2002):
