Gentrification makes trash a discursive and material index of degeneration, mobilizing projects to “clean” and “better” neighborhoods and people. This ethnographic article explores how trash's movements and labor reveal the spatialized and temporalized racial histories of neighborhood transformation in the historically black neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bed-Stuy), Brooklyn and the gentrified town of Norfolk, Virginia. Foregrounding the objects and people whose value(s) are called into question as the context around them changes, I draw on two key interlocutors whose scavenging is conditioned by the “betterment”—community revitalization and “clean up”—programs that seek to displace them. As Sal “saves” Bed-Stuy by directing the flow of the dismembered ghetto, Superfly redirects coffee shop ephemera to black barbershops. By attending to how trash moves, Sal's and Superfly's labor make visible the material conditions of gentrification and point to how race and time are spatialized under racial capitalism.
The blitz on monuments signifies not the abandonment of history, but rather the rejection of a narrative of modernity created by the heirs of global plunder.
This article shifts our attention elsewhere, to the places where living is predicated on knowing with, through, and sometimes as waste. Coming out of a larger project detailing the anti-Black geographies of “long-distance” waste management, the author argues that waste infrastructure holds together white property value and produces absented spaces of Black condemnation, the material “fill” to construct white propertied futures. Against white property, the author follows Betty, a Black sex worker in the Tidewater Region of Virginia, who teaches how stealing, swiping, salvaging, telling, and laboring waste are themselves critiques of how property orders earth, and they are ecological modes forged elsewhere. Through the analytics of flyness, becoming fill, and queer Black geometries of relationality, Betty shows us that living as and proximate to waste refracts fugitive articulations of gender on the move. Always moving at the intersection of Blackness as “a waste of space” and becoming waste object herself, Betty's flyness opens an ecological horizon for rethinking the matter that matters.
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