The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras.
The future of Honduras begins and ends on the white sand beaches of Tela Bay on the country's northeastern coast where Garifuna, a Black Indigenous people, have resided for over two hundred years. In The Ends of Paradise, Christopher Loperena examines the Garifuna struggle for life and collective autonomy, and demonstrates how this struggle challenges concerted efforts by the state and multilateral institutions to render both their lands and their culture into fungible tourism products. He reveals how purportedly inclusive tourism projects form part of a larger neoliberal, extractivist development regime, which remakes Black and Indigenous territories into frontiers of progress for the mestizo majority.
Christopher Loperena is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research examines Indigenous and Black territorial struggles, land, environmental loss, extractivism, and the socio-spatial politics of economic development. He has also published on anthropological witnessing and cultural expertise. His book, The Ends of Paradise: Race, Extraction, and the Struggle for Black Life in Honduras, was published by Stanford University Press in 2022. Loperenas work has appeared in journals such as American Anthropologist, American Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Geoforum, and the Journal of Sustainable Tourism. In addition to his scholarship, he has provided expert testimony at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and in support of asylum claimants from Central America. In 2022, he was awarded a Mellon New Directions Fellowship to begin a project on race, loss, and climate vulnerability in coastal regions of Puerto RicoChristoper Loperena Web Page
Please note that this talk will begin at 4pm.