The Rise and Fall of a Caribbean Refinery

How can the capitalized history of the climate catastrophe be written without reifying the empire of oil as the only author of consequence left? The economic rise and ecological fall of the imperial refinery on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands offers critical insight into this question. Bringing together recent scholarship on the petrochemical composition of US empire, the changing climate of history, and the critical need for a starting point neither entirely within nor entirely beyond the relentless progress of the present catastrophe, this essay reflects on the charged status of history around the rise and fall of the St. Croix refinery. In so doing, this essay both outlines the imperial history of how the refinery invaded St. Croix—and the vibrant resistance farmers mustered before they were violently dispossessed of the land—while also attending to the insurgent memories of alternative futures that have come roaring back to life in the collapse of the refinery and the arrival of superstorms. Such memories refuse the teleology of the American empire of oil and provisionally sketch a more reparative politics built around the empire's uprooting. In other words, this essay is the story of what was forgotten when the oil industry reigned supreme and how such impossible memories now gather like kindling around the climate crisis of today.