The global diffusion and reification of resilience – as the innate acceptance of vulnerability and suffering – has become an increasingly common feature in global development and humanitarian discourses. The advocacy of Disaster Risk Reduction represents a central technique of this global ontology of resilience that aims to influence the individual, the society and the state. This article explores how this global worldview of resilience is received by local rationalities of resilience in the Caribbean. This is achieved by examining Caribbean art as a re-presentational form of identity that shapes distinct ontological understandings of insecurity and vulnerability, which subsequently affects the possibilities of subjectivisation which lead towards local creative resistance or a global consent of suffering.