The Coloniality of Catastrophe in Caribbean Theater and Performance

The Coloniality of Catastrophe in Caribbean Theater and Performance calls attention to theater’s capacity to reveal the constructed roots of catastrophe and offer counter catastrophic strategies to live and imagine otherwise. Engaging anglophone, francophone, and hispanophone theater from across the Caribbean and its diaspora, the 12 essays and one interview foster a pan-Caribbean view of theater, identifying shared tropes and theatrical strategies. Essays address a range of 20th and 21st century works that center the relentless cycle of “natural” disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and floods as well as the catastrophic effects of continuing coloniality more broadly. In doing so, they unsettle the normalization of catastrophe. Exploring the power of theater’s situatedness, its iterative quality, and its special arrangement of time, these works remind us of the impact of embodied co-presence in the political realities of everyday life.