Making livable worlds : Afro-Puerto Rican women building environmental justice

Title:

Author:

Lloréns, Hilda, author.

ISBN:

9780295749396

9780295749402

Personal Author:

Lloréns, Hilda, author.

Physical Description:

xi, 207 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Series:

Decolonizing feminisms

Decolonizing feminisms.

General Note:

Source of cataloging data: WCP

Abstract:

"When hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico on September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pommeled by economic austerity and the decline of liberal democratic governance and its safety net programs. Within the context of economic, political and environmental turmoil of contemporary Puerto Rico, Lloréns centers the work, activism, and lives of those often erased within Puerto Rican society: Black Puerto Rican women. Engaging with anthropology, history and autobiography, Lloréns situates her own "kinfolk" in the island's southeast region, a sugar producing area home to a large Afro-descendant community. Combining autoethnographic narration with the insights of Black studies and decolonial anthropology, Lloréns focuses on practices of mutual care, reciprocity, and solidarity that sustain Black women in the immediate aftermath of these disasters, and which provide the basis for these often excluded communities to survive and thrive, relying on Black ecological knowledge developed over hundreds of years. Narratively rich in its attention to everyday forms of struggle, Making Livable Worlds foregrounds Black women's agency and ongoing efforts to build "a good life" for themselves and their communities"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Introduction: Persevering through life's turbulent ongoingness -- Surviving Matriarchal Dispossession -- Doing Home-Work in the Motherland -- Life-Affirming Practices -- Living with/in Ecological Catastrophe -- Epilogue: A Word About Black Puerto Rican Ecological Knowledge.

Subject Term:

Women -- Puerto Rico -- Social conditions.

Women, Black -- Puerto Rico -- Social conditions.

African Americans -- Puerto Rico.

Ecofeminism -- Puerto Rico -- History.

Human ecology -- Puerto Rico.

Available:*

Library	Material Type	Call Number	Status	Item Holds
Searching... Aurora Downtown	Book	HQ1522 .L56 2021	Searching... Unknown	Searching... Unavailable

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Summary

Winner of the 2022 Frank Bonilla Book Award, sponsored by the Puerto Rican Studies Association

Winner of the 2022 Gregory Bateson Book Prize, sponsored by the Society for Cultural Anthropology

Brings to life Afro-Puerto Rican women?s creative struggles for environmental justice

When Hurricanes Irma and María made landfall in Puerto Rico in September 2017, their destructive force further devastated an archipelago already pummeled by economic austerity, political upheaval, and environmental calamities. To navigate these multiple ongoing crises, Afro?Puerto Rican women have drawn from their cultural knowledge to engage in daily improvisations that enable their communities to survive and thrive. Their life-affirming practices, developed and passed down through generations, offer powerful modes of resistance to gendered and racialized exploitation, ecological ruination, and deepening capitalist extraction. Through solidarity, reciprocity, and an ethics of care, these women create restorative alternatives to dispossession to produce good, meaningful lives for their communities.

Making Livable Worlds weaves together autobiography, ethnography, interviews, memories, and fieldwork to recast narratives that continuously erase Black Puerto Rican women as agents of social change. In doing so, Lloréns serves as an ?ethnographer of home? as she brings to life the powerful histories and testimonies of a marginalized, disavowed community that has been treated as disposable.