At the chaotic outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, amid uprisings for racial justice in our home and partner communities, Field Museum anthropologists sought the guidance of precedent in the museum’s archives of the 1918 influenza epidemic. Those archives, however, were nearly silent on the social upheaval and illness struggles of that moment. Animated by the spectral archives of 1918—the missing traces of an earlier disaster—and haunted by the imperial origins of the disasters that COVID-19 has precipitated and amplified, Field Museum researchers initiated the Pandemic Collection: a project to document the intersection of COVID-19 and movements for racial justice, with community partners from Chicago, the Philippines, Native North America, and the Northwest Amazon. This work makes clear that we are all living in the continuing disaster of empire and that there is no solution that does not learn from, and speak to, our ghosts, our ancestors, and our inheritors.

The Corporación Piñones Se Integra (COPI), a community-based nonprofit organization, comanages and maintains the community’s ancestral mangrove forest. As one of Puerto Rico’s poorest sectors, Piñones has suffered the same ecological hardships that have afflicted the island; however, piñoneros have averted catastrophic flooding of their community by organizing projects to clear brush from mangrove channels and reforest mangrove trees. This article takes an anticolonial, antiracist, and multisited approach to examine how COPI navigates its survival at the margins of the intertwining of US colonialism and Puerto Rican anti-Blackness. To provide a comparative lens with Piñones, I present ethnographic data from the mountain town of Villalba immediately after Hurricane Maria in 2017. Many Puerto Ricans, including those in Piñones, similarly experience “neglect by concern,” which is how citizens of liberal democracies, in both the US and Puerto Rico, recognize social injustices endured by racialized peoples without committing to radical ideas for decolonization and dismantling systemic oppression. However, in addition to ecological hardships at the edges of empire, people in Piñones must negotiate their autonomy, protect their environment, and combat anti-Blackness within a polity that refuses to recognize Blackness as a legitimate source of democratic deliberation.

The conceptual and discursive instrumentalization of migrant return reflects the symbolic power of imperial and racial politics of civil society (of which Africans are absent). Return, as a paradigm through which nations pursue the reorganization of internal demographics and solve demographic anxieties, also operates on moral and register, which are differentially animated by European (white) and Black African sentiments and attitudes toward Black African migration. This article focuses on return as violence in three ways within the humanitarian-migration control nexus in which it operates to remove Black Africans from irregular pathways to Europe. First, it argues that migrant return is an imperial tool that governments and international nongovernmental organizations like the International Organization for Migration use to physically move Black Africans across states within Africa through various bureaucratic and political means. Second, it argues that return can hide its everyday violence behind moments of the spectacular and promotes this anti-Black violence as the contingent, rather than the ontological, status of Black peoples. Third, it engages the ways that return represents a segregative biopolitics that focuses on a moralized resituating of peoples along racial-geographic imaginaries.

This article examines the relationship between care, protest, and religious life in the Afro–Puerto Rican city of Loíza. Situated during El Verano Boricua (Puerto Rican Summer) in summer 2019, it pays particular attention to the way a devotee of Santiago Apóstol, driven by his hagiographic life in Loíza, was compelled to join in protests and demonstrations that demanded the resignation of then-governor Ricardo “Ricky” Rosselló. I attended protests and demonstrations in Viejo San Juan with Mónica, a Loiceña devotee of Santiago, and learned how he looked after (cuidar) and sided with the people of Loíza. Mónica described cuidar as care, protection, and responsibility that in 2019 took the form of protest. Drawing on this, I place cuidar in conversation with “radical care” to argue that protest is a form of heterogenous and spontaneous care.

Much scholarly and popular ink has been spilled in debates regarding whether contemporary Chinese economic investments in Africa constitute a “New Chinese Empire.” Focusing on macrolevel politics and state-to-state relations, both sides of this debate tend to ignore the everyday lived realities of Chinese migrants and local Africans. In this article, based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork at Chinese-operated mining enterprises in rural Zambia, I analyze intersecting inequalities of class, race, and gender that structure intimate relationships between Zambian women and Chinese men. The constraints on women’s agency that emerge when such relationships end are enmeshed within the wider structural disparities between Zambia and China today. These disparities result as much from the institutional policies of the Chinese state and state-owned enterprises as they do from the behavior of individual Chinese men. Deconstructing official narratives, I demonstrate how these policies operate as a form of “South-South” capitalist extractive patriarchy.