Caribbean Island Vulnerabilities: Puerto Rico

3 units

Tropical and subtropical islands have long been imagined as a tourist's paradise, replete with the pleasures of sun, surf, sand, and sex. At the same time, long histories of colonization, exploitation, resource extraction, and slavery have produced a very different reality for many residents of islands located in and around the Caribbean Sea. More recently, communities in the Caribbean region have been subject to extreme weather events that bring the current politics of climate change into conversation with centuries-old problems related to economic isolation, infrastructure, human poverty, and ecological vulnerability. This course explores the nature of island disasters, both sudden and slow, by examining ethnographically the global histories that today inform Caribbeanness and the politics of everyday island life. We will further analyze the impact of media coverage on North American understandings of the Caribbean through a close examination of Puerto Rico.