Caribbean Studies Section: The Intimacies of Extractivism—New Works on Resource Extraction, Energy, and Disruption

Like the plantation, modern extractive industries have imperiled the lives of Caribbean people while channeling wealth abroad. This process has reinscribed racial and gendered hierarchies, depended on ambiguous intimacies and sovereignties, and exacted disastrous environmental costs. Yet, as in times of enslavement, Caribbean people have also found ways to disrupt and challenge this system and to rethink Caribbean economies from below.

This panel highlights new scholarship on extractivism, its structures, and its discontents in the Caribbean. It brings together scholars with expertise in Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands who locate resource extraction, particularly oil, as central sites for considering the afterlives of the plantation in the region.