“With a Vengeance”: An Examination of How Black Women of the U.S. Virgin Islands Weather Disasters
Topics:
Keywords: The U.S. Virgin Islands, Disaster Response, Black Feminist Ecological Thought, Black Ecology, Oral Histories
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Authors:
Lauren Sierra Prince,
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Abstract
In 2017, Hurricanes Irma and Maria, two category five storms, ravaged the U.S. Virgin Islands
(USVI), an unincorporated island territory of the U.S. empire, leaving deep scars and revealing
disparities in disaster response. Analyzing how the storms impacted Black Virgin Islanders,
notably by devastating the islands’ infrastructure, destroying homes, shifting the natural
landscape, and forcing residents to live in a disaster zone, is generative in thinking about
questions surrounding hazard, risk, vulnerability, and disaster. The USVI, situated in the
Caribbean, is particularly vulnerable to environmental disasters, the effects of which are
exacerbated by colonialism, racism, and gender inequality (systems of oppression). This paper
draws upon the oral histories of eight USVI Black women who weathered the hurricanes to
highlight the gaps within disaster response and connect these gaps to broader histories and
legacies of exploitation, necropolitics, and erasure of colonized populations on island territories.
I argue that the insights of Black women in the USVI about the hurricanes constitute an
essential component of Black Feminist Ecological Thought and Black Ecology, which historicize
disaster vulnerability in new ways while reimagining future possibilities for Black communities.
Despite remaining “invisible” to the American empire, Black women of the USVI have developed
strategies, knowledge, and networks of care to survive these disasters and the climate crisis
more broadly. This paper contributes to a growing body of work that posits Black women’s ways
of knowing as valid and a form of insurgent knowledge that imagines alternative futures
organized around the well-being of self and community.
“With a Vengeance”: An Examination of How Black Women of the U.S. Virgin Islands Weather Disasters
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract