Colonial Debts

Most discussions of Puerto Rico's political situation focus on the colonial condition and the dynamics that produced it, understanding the "political" in a narrow sense as the power relations that could lead toward a different form of sovereign rule from the prevailing one.Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico offers a persuasive case for situating colonial dynamics beyond this narrow understanding of politics.Roco Zambrana makes an argument for analyzing debt as a form of coloniality that actualizes race/gender/class inequalities emerging from the uneven distribution of precariousness, dispossession, and violence.She offers an assessment of the operation of coloniality in Puerto Rico by exploring how debt functions as an apparatus of capture, predation, and extraction across racialized/gendered populations.One of this book's innovations is to advance a theoretical perspective that allows the study of the coloniality of power in a context where colonialism is still in place.Here, coloniality is not a matrix of power that exceeded colonialism but a technology of power that actualizes race/gender/class hierarchies in a colony through debt.Zambrana invites readers to track coloniality in the colony, not to reduce one to the other.The concept of neoliberal coloniality provides an excellent illustration of how she proposes this.Drawing on works by Ariadna Godreau-Aubert and Maurizio Lazzarato, neoliberal coloniality captures the complexities of indebted life in the colony.Zambrana argues that debt and austerity disproportionally impact women, especially Black women, in Puerto Rico, renewing precariousness along racial and gender lines.She explains that violence and precarity stem not from the colonial condition but from the ongoing coloniality of power that adapts race/gender/class hierarchies according to capital's needs.The construction of a failed "neoliberal subject" incapable of paying its debts works as an injunction to pay by marking racialized and gendered populations as disposable.Zambrana's point is that not all colonial subjects are impacted in the same way by indebted life in the colony.Although the unequal distribution of austerity has been widely documented in academic literature, what is particular to Zambrana's work is that she analyzes this uneven distribution through the coloniality of power.Another interesting feature of this book is that debt is not considered exclusively as an instrument of subordination but also as a space for subversions.The idea of "Historical Reckoning" is used as a process of accountability to recognize who owns whom in creditor-debtor relations.The subversive potential of debt is moving from acknowledging financial debt to realizing historical debts as colonial debts.Zambrana understands

Austerity · Colonialism · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · History · Law