In The Elsewhere Is Black, Marisa Solomon examines how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism. Tracing the flow of trash and waste across Black spaces, from Brooklyn’s historically Black Bedford-Stuyvesant to the post-plantation towns of Virginia’s Tidewater, Solomon contends that waste infrastructures concentrate environmental risk in an elsewhere that is routinely Black. Solomon emphasizes that ecological violence is a form of racialized heteropatriarchal environmental control that upholds whiteness as a propertied way of life and criminalizes Black survival. As she points to acute sites of toxicity, Solomon theorizes the relationship between the devaluation of land and Black and more-than-human life to reveal how the risks of poisoning, police violence, dispossession, and poverty hold Black life captive. Locating Black survival as a site from which alternative eco-political imaginations spring, she foregrounds how people live and dream amidst waste’s daily accumulation. Solomon opens new ecological horizons to ask: What forms of environmentalism emerge when Black un/freedom has never been distant from waste?
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Introducing the Elsewhere
- Flow
- 1. Toxic Capture
- Infrastructure
- 2. Becoming Fill
- Surplus
- 3. Revisions from Elsewhere
- Disposal
- 4. Black Refractions
- Junk
- Conclusion: Fictions of Fabulous/ Fabulative Ethnography
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- A
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- C
- D
- E
- F
- G
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- I
- J
- K
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- N
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- R
- S
- T
- U
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- W
- Y
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