Description
This paper theorizes disaster, through a framework of racial capitalism. Using Black Studies and Afro-feminist critiques, the paper analyses research interviews with three leading emergency planning practitioners from the UK, to outline the racialized erasures embedded within disaster knowledge-and-practice. It traces disaster as a temporally and spatially bounded notion, revealing visibility and borders (of disaster) to be structured through racialized erasures, and as upheld by powerful libidinal drive. The paper reflects how the making of disaster operates through colonial production of racialized threat and practices of cleanliness. The argument emerges that ‘disaster’ is white suffering, which, through sanitizing and making orderly the disaster site, situates all forms of suffering manageable and controllable. This forecloses the possibility for needing to see and govern violence and suffering differently. The conversation highlights the conflicted state of practitioners enacting disaster knowledge, and offers a possible mode of resistance through processes of forgetting and abandonment. Deploying strong reflexivity as a methodology to encounter disaster knowledge within the framework of racial capitalism, allows the paper ultimately to argue for abandoning a commitment to projects of inclusion and visibility. Moreover, as disaster knowledge is constituted through colonial relationality, queer forgetting of disaster and the libidinal drive enable the terms of racial capitalism to be defiantly resisted. The paper denaturalizes security studies research on visibility, borders, and affect, arguing that each are central to the structuring of disaster. Unsettling the racialized politics of disaster enables the destabilization of racial capitalism itself to occur.
