Fragmenting, Repeating, Rebuilding: The Chaotic Cyclones of Gisèle Pineau’s L’Espérance-macadam

This article explores the creative potential of the repeating cyclones at the heart of Gisèle Pineau’s 1995 novel L’Espérance-macadam. Examining the novel in relation to Édouard Glissant’s chaos-monde, it understands the cyclone not simply as catastrophe but also as an ambiguous agent of chaos in line with Glissant’s key metaphor of the slave ship, capable of both destroying and building anew a community through violent cycles of unearthing, fragmenting and interweaving. Engaging with previous critical readings of Pineau’s cyclonic figures that have relied on Freud’s “repetition compulsion”, this article argues that Pineau’s representation of external and internal repetitive events—natural disasters and personal traumas—are not to be read as regression or stasis, but as the possibility of incremental progress through constant movement and towards what Pineau names an “espérance-macadam”. Repetition thus becomes a catalyst for systemic change, allowing her protagonist to process trauma, join a community of survivors of sexual abuse and environmental injustice and find agency within and through the cyclonic events that affect her community.

Green Gentrification and Environmental Injustice: A Discussion Based on the New Pinheiros River Program, São Paulo, Brazil

Through the analysis of the New Pinheiros River Program, São Paulo, Brazil, the differences in the solutions presented are considered to implement environmental projects in different territories over the same sub-basin. Vulnerable neighborhoods upstream will receive only basic infrastructure; while Marginal Pinheiros, a rich place, will be contemplated with aditional leisure, sports and cultural equipments. The general aim is to analyze the process of capitalist production of the Pinheiros River depolluting program area, proposed by the São Paulo State government in 2019, as well as green gentrification and creation of environmental injustice. Methodology consists of bibliographic research and analysis of the program's documents and speeches of people in charge. Global South cities have been experimenting environmental injustice as a result of financial capital investments.

Policing Environmental Injustice

Environmental justice (EJ) activists have long worked with abolitionists in their communities, critiquing the ways policing, prisons, and pollution are entangled and racially constituted (Braz and Gilmore 2006). Yet, much EJ scholarship reflects a liberal Western focus on a more equal distribution of harms, rather than challenging the underlying systems of exploitation these harms rest upon (Álvarez and Coolsaet 2020). This article argues that policing facilitates environmentally unjust developments that are inherently harmful to nature and society. Policing helps enforce a social order rooted in the ‘securing’ of property, hierarchy, and human-nature exploitation. Examining the colonial continuities of policing, we argue that EJ must challenge the assumed necessity of policing, overcome the mythology of the state as ‘arbiter of justice’, and work to create social conditions in which policing is unnecessary. This will help open space to question other related harmful hegemonic principles. Policing drives environmental injustice, so EJ must embrace abolition.