Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico

Radical Américas

by Rocio Zambrana

With the largest municipal debt in US history and a major hurricane that destroyed much of the archipelago's infrastructure, Puerto Rico has emerged as a key site for the exploration of neoliberalism and disaster capitalism. In Colonial Debts Rocío Zambrana develops the concept of neoliberal coloniality in light of Puerto Rico's debt crisis. Drawing on decolonial thought and praxis, Zambrana shows how debt functions as an apparatus of predation that transforms how neoliberalism operates. Debt functions as a form of coloniality, intensifying race, gender, and class hierarchies in ways that strengthen the colonial relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States. Zambrana also examines the transformation of protest in Puerto Rico. From La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción's actions, long-standing land rescue/occupation in the territory, to the July 2019 protests that ousted former governor Ricardo “Ricky” Rosselló, protests pursue variations of decolonial praxis that subvert the positions of power that debt installs. As Zambrana demonstrates, debt reinstalls the colonial condition and adapts the racial/gender order essential to it, thereby emerging as a key site for political-economic subversion and social rearticulation.

Genres: Academic

280 pages, Hardcover

Published June 4, 2021

Reviews

[Mariella · Rating 2 out of 5]

I want to like this book but I found it super too high level theoretical and mostly inaccessible with the ties to PR definitely worked throughout but lost.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me awhile to fully comprehend what was being argued here, but I think the passage on Dienst's contention that debt is analogous to the enclosure examined by Marx in Volume I of Capital (of Fraser's second tier, the "backstory" of Capital), but that it acts on the body rather than on land, is illuminating: Zambrana is concerned with how colonial exploitation "lands" on the racialized, sexed, and classed body, hierarchized and thus variably affected as it is, in an attempt to tie economics to somatics. I will say, despite the flurry of references, most of which are to figures which I do not count among my influences (many of which are mentioned only to be immediately revised via critique), I found this text far less theoretical than Zambrana's first, Hegel's Theory of Intelligibility, which to this day remains essential for me.

[sofia alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

Needed a second opinion or editor