69 © The Author(s) 2019 S. Deckard, S. Shapiro (eds.), World Literature, Neoliberalism, and the Culture of Discontent, New Comparisons in World Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05441-0_3 CHAPTER 3 From “Section 936” to “Junk”: Neoliberalism, Ecology, and Puerto Rican Literature Kerstin Oloff That neoliberalism is “badly wounded today, dominant but dead” (Smith 2010), that it is still holding a death grip on the present, is nowhere more visible than in the violent, indeed deadly, socio-ecological crisis af ficting Puerto Rico. 1 The present chapter was originally written in the months before hurricane Maria devastated the island and its already fragile infra- structure on September 20, 2017. 2 This disaster tragically intensifed the dynamics identifed in the texts I discuss, exposing an “extreme depen- dence on imported fuel and food” (Klein 2018). It was, as many point out, “unnatural” (de Onís 2018: 1), rapidly exacerbating the legacies of a history of colonial exploitation and of more recent rounds of disaster capitalism and neoliberal austerity. The hurricane’s tragic and ongoing aftermath has been marked by governmental neglect and corruption, and the rise of further rounds of disaster capitalism and austerity measures (see Klein 2018). Indeed, Maria’s impact amply illustrates Ashley Dawson’s observation that, within the age of climate change, inequality is further K. Oloff (*) Durham, UK e-mail: k.d.oloff@durham.ac.uk