Racializing Resilience: Assemblage, Critique, and Contested Futures in Greater Miami Resilience Planning

Abstract

This article responds to the following paradox: As government actors have begun to operationalize resilience in a variety of ways and contexts, critical analyses of resilience have continued to sidestep empirical complexity in favor of “black boxing” the concept. This article advances a different analytical path. Drawing on a case study of Greater Miami resilience initiatives, and reading across literatures on critical race theory, critical resilience studies, and Foucauldian-inspired understandings of critical practice, the article develops an inductive framework for analyzing resilience politics and its intersection with prevailing racial formations. Doing so allows us to make sense of two seemingly contradictory events: how, on the one hand, resilience initiatives are topologically recalibrating techniques that produce and manage racialized difference in the Miami metropolitan economy to govern uncertain futures—specifically, segregation, centralization, expertise, and gradualism—and how, on the other hand, activists are mobilizing resilience to both critique and challenge these techniques and their legacies of racial exclusion. We thus argue that resilience is a site of indeterminate politics and that inductive modes of inquiry can help unpack how resilience comes to reinforce uneven power relations—and thus identify previously overlooked possibilities for strategic intervention.