Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm ed. by Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón (review)

In September 2017, two major hurricanes—Irma and María—wreaked havoc in the Caribbean archipelago. They left behind thousands of deaths, unimaginable destruction, and hundreds of thousands of people struggling to meet their basic needs. For Puerto Rico and its neighbors, the aftermath of these natural events laid bare the region’s failing infrastructures, necropolitical governments, and the legacy of hundreds of years of underdevelopment, the violence of racial capitalism, and colonialism. Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón reimagine the concept of aftershocks in discussing the structures and events that preceded the hurricane (and continued afterwards). As the editors argue, the book “examines both Hurricane Maria’s aftershocks and its foreshocks—the sociohistorical context of debt crisis, migration, and coloniality in which the storm took place” (3). That is the context that grounds this timely and urgent edited volume.

The book is the product of a conference that took place at Rutgers University in September 2018, a year after Hurricane María hit Puerto Rico. It is divided into 30 chapters organized around five thematic parts. The first part includes a dialogue between Yarimar Bonilla and Naomi Klein, and is followed by the play ¡Ay María!, which was staged in all 78 Puerto Rican towns a month after the hurricane. The 10 chapters in the second part describe the traumatic experiences Puerto Ricans faced, using different narrative styles such as memoir, diary notes, lists, and poetry. The third part includes eight chapters that deal with the aesthetics and representation of the disaster, citizenship, and engaged practices. The fourth part explores the political, fiscal, and social disasters that took place before, during, and after María. The book’s last section centers the ways people have resisted these crises and continue to do so. The book begins with trauma but closes with collective processes that could create a new Puerto Rico.

The book has to be understood as part of an important yet understudied Puerto Rican radical intellectual tradition of edited volumes as counter-archives that document particular sociopolitical events, desires, and emotions. This tradition can be traced back to the early twentieth-century’s counter-hegemonic intellectual working-class communities. Thus, the book blurs the line between academic and public scholarship. Its authors come from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds. Even though the book is grounded in a particular historical process—the hurricane’s aftermath and foreshocks—the chapters often read as testimonios rather than mere explanations, analyses, or narrations.

Most, if not all, of the book’s chapters or interventions are written by centering each author’s positionalities and lived experiences. This is perhaps one of the book’s most important achievements: it is a counter-archive of colonial trauma and collective pain, but also of potential radical futures. Precisely because of its transdisciplinarity, scholars looking for traditional academic modes of writing will find most of the chapter introductions repetitive. For example, most chapters begin by retelling what happened on September 19, 2017, through each author’s subjectivities.

Another important aspect of the book was its quick publication. And here, I think the book challenges US-centered modes of knowledge production, which are based on slow turnarounds and with the sole goal of advancing tenure potential, not on making an impact in public conversations. The book came out barely a year after the original conference that gave life to the edited volume, and just two years after María. The text’s undisciplined nature is a testament to how the editors imagined its impact beyond academia. Some of the chapters do not deliver decisive conclusions and can feel hasty, but this is because the book demonstrates a desire to make a social and political intervention in the Puerto Rican public sphere—in both the archipelago and its global diaspora. Since Hurricane María and the...