Description
Book SynopsisEnergy Islands provides an urgent and nuanced portrait of collective action that resists racial capitalism, colonialism, and climate disruption. Weaving together historical and ethnographic research, this story challenges the master narratives of Puerto Rico as a tourist destination and site of naturaldisasters to demonstrate how fossil fuel economies are inextricably entwined with colonial practices and how local community groups in Puerto Rico have struggled against energy coloniality to mobilize and transform power from the ground up. Catalina M. de Onís documents how these groups work to decenter continental contexts and deconstruct damaging hierarchies that devalue and exploit rural coastal communities. She highlights and collaborates with individuals who refuse the cruel logics of empire by imagining and implementing energy justice and other interconnected radical power transformations. Diving deeply into energy, islands, and power, this book engages various metaphors for alternative world-making.
Table of ContentsList of Figures
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Map of Puerto Rico
Introduction: Amplifying Puerto Rican Voices in Power Struggles
Part One: Forming Energies
Routes/Roots/Raíces I: Recuerdos familiares [Family Memories]
Chapter One: Dis/empowering Terms of an Energy Rhetorical Matrix
Routes/Roots/Raíces II: Hydrocarbon Hauntings
Chapter Two: Experimenting Energies of Defense, Disease, Development, and Disaster
Part Two: Powering the Present and Future
Chapter Three: Generating Methane Metaphors to Fuel and Fight Extractivism
Routes/Roots/Raíces III: Account-ability in un revolú
Chapter Four: (Re)wiring Coalitions for Radical Transformations
Routes/Roots/Raíces IV: "Las cosas del barrio"
(No) Conclusion: Delinking for Energy Justice
Appendix: Puerto Rico and US Diasporic Organizations and Initiatives
Notes
References
Index
