ABSTRACT
Since its inception in the 1950s, disaster studies as an interdisciplinary field has been concerned with managing crisis situations, seeking to reduce vulnerability and assist post-disaster recovery. This has become increasingly important over the last few decades as the various risks that inhere in human–environmental relationships have been amplified not only by anthropogenic climate change but also by the capitalist exploitation of natural resources. Both these processes have accelerated in the period of expansive globalization following World War II (see Figure 5.1), resulting in natural hazards’ frequent conversion into large-scale catastrophes. It is no surprise that these take a disproportionate toll on the world's poorest communities, many of which are still grappling with the legacies of western colonialism and neocolonial practices. The World Bank is more than aware that developing countries suffer the most from disasters (World Bank 2014), and as Naomi Klein's work on “disaster capitalism” highlights (2007), these regions have been subjected to systematic dispossession through the spread of free-market doctrine. In addition to increased environmental vulnerabilities, the social crises that have shadowed political decolonization—including war, genocide, and systemic poverty—have been catastrophic for large numbers of people, radically transforming natural and built environments in ways that coincide with current forms of ecological imperialism. All this makes disaster response and management central to postcolonial concerns, with postcolonial studies emerging over the last three decades in the context of global problems such as accelerating economic disparities, resource scarcity, climate change, and US-led wars. In particular, disaster analysis can shed light on how specific colonial practices produce differential forms of vulnerability, raising the question of what happens if we treat postcolonial studies as a form of disaster studies and vice versa. The aim of this chapter is to open up some perspectives on this relationship through consideration of what a postcolonial disaster studies might entail. Its core conviction is that postcolonial studies has much to contribute both in recalibrating applied fields such as disaster studies, and in advancing the environmental humanities’ commitment to imagining alternatives to ecological destruction. This involves analyzing the cultural politics that accompany narratives of disaster mitigation and recovery, and foregrounding the conceptual changes that are required to decrease vulnerability.118
