Infrastructural Reparations: Reimagining Reparative Justice in Haiti and Puerto Rico

Mimi Sheller

doi:10.20336/rbs.974

Authors

Mimi Sheller WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.20336/rbs.974

Keywords:

infrastructural citizenship, coloniality, racialization, Caribbean, blockchain

Abstract

Infrastructure has an inherently uneven capacity to connect and to provide for some people certain goods and particular flows of information, while at the same time disenfranchising and dehumanizing other people through the very processes of (dis)connecting elements of the urban condition. Infrastructural injustices shape times, time horizons and life cycles. There is a lack of synchronicity in the time horizons of durability, materiality, engineering and financialization of infrastructure versus the immediate needs of living people and communities – but there is also need for a longer time horizon that acknowledges the demand for historical reparations in addition to immediate needs. Reparative infrastructural justice insists on overturning the violence of the infrastructural dispositions that have long upheld White supremacy by dehumanizing Black, Brown and Indigenous people, and other people of colour. Those with no claims upon the state to provide the basics of life must go beyond repair or maintenance, to seek instead infrastructural reparations and reparative justice as material conditions for living in the wake of the racialized infrastructural colour line built upon histories of slavery, colonialism and climate disaster. This text reflects on some of the tactics of flexible, provisional, infrastructural reparations that have emerged in Haiti and Puerto Rico, where public infrastructure systems have drastically failed. In Haiti tactics of appropriation involved communities (and gangs) patching into fractured systems where there is little state provision. In Puerto Rico, disaster led to grassroots organizations calling for just recovery, but also blockchain entrepreneurs taking advantage of offshore opportunities to escape the state. Both cases demonstrate the precarity, power, opportunities and dangers hidden within decentralized systems in the face of splintered infrastructural systems.

Author Biography

Mimi Sheller, WORCESTER POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE

Dr. Mimi Sheller EDUCATION AB History and Literature Harvard University MA Sociology and Historical Studies New School for Social Research PhD Sociology and Historical Studies New School for Social Research

Dr. Mimi Sheller is the Dean of The Global School and is an internationally recognized scholar and higher education leader, with fifteen years of executive leadership across academic units, research centers, and professional organizations.

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