Animals, beaches, stars and spirits

A more-than-human approach to Caribbean ecologies

Abstract

This Exploration highlights recent and emergent themes in the study of Caribbean ecologies across the social sciences and humanities. It draws particular attention to the field of black ecologies, which extends a longstanding engagement with the socio-ecological legacies of colonialism and plantation slavery, foregrounding the racialized nature of environmental harm while also underlining the various forms of worldmaking and free-dom afforded by Caribbean ecologies. After sketching the main concerns in existing analyses of Caribbean ecologies, it explores how such approaches might be connected to new avenues for research, through four subsections that focus respectively on animals, beaches, stars and spirits. In so doing, it outlines the possibility of new conversations between Caribbean, black and more-than-human theory, demonstrating how Caribbean ecological thought and practice involve explicitly political post-humanist approaches.