Book Talk: Dr. Christopher Loperena Presents “The End of Paradise”

Christopher Loperena is Associate Professor in the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research examines Indigenous and Black territorial struggles, land, 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, is with Stanford University Press. His work has appeared in journals such as American Anthropologist, American Quarterly, Cultural Anthropology, Current Anthropology, Geoforum, and the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

Description:

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.