UCSF

On the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, people and invasive green monkeys both suffer from food insecurity, a phenomenon locally known as “the monkey problem.” This dissertation argues that the monkey problem is sustained by the persistent logics of the former plantation economy and mismatched sensorial attunements between those who experience the daily discontents of the island and those who govern it from positions of transnational power. I utilize an eco-horror framework to analyze the monkey problem as an uncanny affective infrastructure that shifts my interlocutors' subjective experiences into a stressful site of anxiety, vigilance, and frustration. Central to this work is the development of the framework “affective consent.” Diverging from Joseph Fischel’s (2019) proposition to “screw consent” due to its inherent ableist and anthropocentric limitations, I delineate affective consent as an alternative descriptive category to capture the non-verbal mediations of agreement and refusal enacted in imperfect conditions by beings – both human and animal – who are currently excluded from Western models of informed and affirmative consent. In farms and research laboratories (“monkey farms”), I observed people already attuned to the mediations of affective consent in caring for and about monkeys. At the same time, the processes of sedation and desensitization normalize cycles of non-consent that haunt the grounds of former sugar plantations. To investigate these dynamics, I conducted 16 months of ethnographic observations, archival research at local newspapers and government archives, and semi-structured interviews with farmers, trappers, scientists, veterinarians, government officials, and tourists. Using a critical multi-species ethnographic methodology, I analyzed the human-animal interface across various sites, including farms, research laboratories, and ecotourism destinations. This approach emphasizes attention to affect – nonverbal and multi-temporal sensory modes – to track how historical trauma and contemporary power dynamics coalesce in the present moment. In exploring unsettling science and consent on St. Kitts, this dissertation makes three distinct contributions to anthropology, Science and Technology Studies (STS), and related fields. First, in conducting discourse analysis of descriptions and stories of the monkey problem in research, news, science, and my interlocutors’ accounts, I contend that mismatched sensorial attunements – different capacities to see and understand the world – lead to disagreements and conflicts over the nature of the monkey problem. Second, I argue that environmental racism is sustained through the persistent logics of the former plantation economy, which continue to affect everyday life in different forms. Third, I assert that only by attending to the non-consents of people and animals who are silenced by unequal power relations, in the past and present, can we move away from reproducing plantation logics and embrace queer feminist and decolonial visions for the future, including food sovereignty.