| Popis: |
Resilience is an increasingly pervasive discourse for mitigating future climate risks, and one which the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) uses frequently, yet even critical literature around resilience tends to remain in the realm of abstraction, and to assume rather than investigate the intersections of race and resilience. In Canarsie, Brooklyn, drastic expansions of the city’s flood risk maps for the NFIP combined with congressional legislation that slashes NFIP subsidies means thousands of Canarsie residents who have never previously been required to purchase flood insurance will soon face mandatory premiums of $5,000-$15,000 per year.The 85% black neighborhood of Canarsie was targeted by more subprime loans in the 2000s than any other neighborhood in New York City, but the existing literature provides little guidance on how to investigate the intersection between the neighborhood’s history of racialized housing and a federal program aiming to render the neighborhood resilient by regulating housing. The dissonance between the mundane violence of housing displacement in Canarsie and the detached, abstract prescriptions that dominate the resilience literature led me to identify the urgent need for ethnographies that can produce a grounded account of resilience. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Canarsie, I argue that as opposed to framing the subprime lending crisis and NFIP changes as two temporally disparate events, a theoretical lens that centers social reproduction can question the divisions of temporality within deployments of resilience. In doing so I show how the NFIP, by instituting resilience at the scale of the household, contributes to and constitutes another iteration of a broader history of racialized housing inequalities in the U.S. |
