“Losing Miami”: Imagining Post-Extractivist Futures in the “Magic City”

Abstract

Against the principled ecological wisdom of economic degrowth in the face of planetary catastrophe, echoed throughout a capacious archive of work on stable-state economies and the imperative to restrict the ceaseless extraction of the biosphere, the sunshine state has doubled down on relentless growth in its primary economic sectors. Investment in agrocapital, for example—most notably sugar and phosphate—moves forward relentlessly, despite the clear ecological consequences of continued investment in such extractive economies; so too, their deleterious impacts on the state’s largely Afro-Caribbean and Latinx working class, many of whom work in either the state’s agricultural corridor or in the rock quarries that flank Miami.  As an example of uneven development, and what critics have lately termed uneven disaster,  the city of Miami incisively illustrates the settler logics that have long drawn speculators to Florida’s central and southeastern bioregions; and it is to Miami that I shall draw my attention when considering the disastrous impacts of agrocapitalism (and unchecked industrial development more broadly) in an era increasingly defined by cataclysmic shifts to global and local climate. Specifically, in this essay I examine Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué’s book-length poem Losing Miami in order to explore the impacts of Florida’s feckless development schemes on Miami’s coastal precariat. Although, as I shall also argue, Losing Miami is not merely a critique; it is a provocation. What I term Ojeda-Sagué’s “limestone lyricism” offers both a productive vehicle for thinking through the violent histories of Jim Crow, and the role of private property in the production of citizenship; and it likewise presents the possibility that Miami’s sinking endoskeleton may be ripe for coalition-building in the face of imminent disaster.