Hidden transcripts of resilience: power and politics in Jamaican disaster management

Abstract

This paper draws on assemblage theory and post-colonial theories to analyse the politics of community-based disaster resilience. Through a case study of community-based disaster resilience programming in Jamaica, I unpack the biopolitical strategies practitioners deploy in assembling cultures of safety and fashioning resilient subjects. My analysis draws out two juxtaposed forms of resilience that circulate within Jamaican disaster management and are not reducible to the interests of specific social actors: neoliberal and subversive resilience. While both rely on the same categories of self-sufficiency, responsibility and freedom, the latter operates through qualitatively distinct state–society relations that facilitate rather than problematise local populations' adaptive capacity. Assemblage theory introduces a new ethos into resilience thinking that is sensitive to the contemporaneous multiplicity and indeterminacy of resilience, and the possible ‘hidden transcripts’ of resilience that subversively resi...