This dissertation makes the case for the analytical purchase of a Caribbean Anthropocene. Anthropocene debates typically rely on expansive temporal and spatial scales that cast climate change as diffuse, gradual, and difficult to apprehend. Read from the Caribbean, however, the Anthropocene appears first as punctuated, catastrophic “event-time,” where hurricanes, floods, and sea-level rise are lived as crises of breath, syntax, and survival rather than as distant planetary trends. Naming this reorientation the “Caribbean Anthropocene,” I treat the region not as a case study but as a vantage point from which natural forces reorganize perception, language, and survival in the wake of plantation, empire, and racial capitalism. Developing this claim through readings of twentieth- and twenty-first-century literature, poetry, visual culture, and testimonios from Puerto Rico, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Dominica, Cuba, and Martinique, as well as diasporic communities in Miami and New Orleans, paired with archives of drainage projects, airports, levees, insurance, and border regimes, the dissertation advances a multi-sited, multi-disciplinary, and multi-textual method. Each chapter follows hurricanes, floods, and sea chemistries across islands, archives, and genres to show how event-time is registered at intimate scales of language and survival. Reading with Édouard Glissant, M. NourbeSe Philip, Celia Sorhaindo, Sylvia Wynter, Ana Menéndez, Ana-Maurine Lara, Rita Indiana, Junot Diaz, and Yoss, hurricanes reshape meter and syntax when storm acoustics and repetitive maintenance labor interrupt speech and writing; flooding emerges as a triple surge of water, displaced people, and speculative capital that exposes hydrological sovereignty, the fantasy that drainage and zoning can fix wet landscapes, and hydro-debility, the condition of financial drowning that anticipates physical inundation; finally, the Caribbean Sea appears as an obliterative archive and altar whose chemistries corrode bodies and documents even as they carry memory and obligation, a dynamic that informs both Philip’s Zong! (2008) and Dominican climate fiction that multiplies the end of the world into partial, situated endings. By establishing event time as an evidentiary scale and elaborating tempo, volume, and corrosion as literary measures of climate, the dissertation offers a situated “wet feet” method for reading climate with, rather than only about, frontline communities.