NARRATIVE STORM: ECOCRITICAL NEOREALISM, CLIMATE CHANGE, AND THE CARIBBEAN

Narrative Storm is an interdisciplinary book about climate change in the Caribbean, focused specifically on Puerto Rico. The book tells the story of how, thanks to its mid-twentieth century embrace of modernization, Puerto Rico turned its back on the rich biodiversity of its island landscape. However, the intensification of hurricanes as a result of climate change has shifted the island’s focus from a primary concern with its political status vis-à-vis the mainland US to the question of island sustainability. Drawing on disciplinary training in discourse analysis and narrative theory (as well as on second-discipline training in Landscape Architecture), Narrative Storm analyzes the multifaceted conflict between growing environmental awareness on the US mainland on one hand and Puerto Rico’s increasing commitment to industrialization on the other. Considering over a century’s worth of transformations in Puerto Rico’s landscape, the book traces the development of agricultural monoculture on the island; successive waves of deforestation in the service of modernization; the subsequent intensification of hurricane vulnerability; and more recent investments—after devastating hurricanes—in reforestation and sustainable landscape design. Because each of these developments has been driven by complex ideological forces, the book develops some of the research completed for Soto-Crespo’s first book, Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico, which examined political theories and histories to account for the island’s anomalous legal status vis-à-vis the US mainland. If Mainland Passage uncovered a specifically Puerto Rican tradition of “border thinking,” then Narrative Storm aims to uncover a hitherto unnoticed pattern of conflicts in the development of modernization and environmentalism in the Caribbean. It does so by treating modernization and environmentalism as narratives which yield to the interpretive methods of the humanities.