Waste Siege and Electrical Palestine are two impressive texts that read together provide a historical and contemporary view into the politics of sanitation and energy in Palestine. These texts are unique in their insistence that scholars researching Palestine begin their work from the material relations that undergird everyday life. While the books emerge from distinct disciplinary traditions and examine two different time periods, they are united by their approach to infrastructure as always a product of power laden relationships. Both Stamatopoulou-Robbins and Meiton argue that ignoring this fact is not just about overlooking nuance; the stakes, in and beyond Palestine, are much higher. As Meiton suggests, "mistaking a political object for a natural one elides and thus perpetuates, even intensifies, the politics built into it" (p. 8). But as both scholars show, expressing the infrastructural relation between technics and politics is often difficult because infrastructures operate "in continual violation of the received domains of social theory," namely economy, science, and culture (Meiton, p. 14). In Waste Siege, Stamatopoulou-Robbins therefore argues that analyzing infrastructural relations requires a new lexicon not only to sharpen academic analysis, but also, and perhaps more importantly, to better form international solidarity.
Discards and everyday lifeWaste Siege offers a contextually-grounded, object-oriented ethnography of post-Oslo Palestine. Stamatopoulou-Robbins turns to everyday encounters with waste "to think about capitalism's material excesses and where they converge with contemporary colonial processes and statecraft" (p. xiii). Spanning the rabish markets of Jenin and Jaffa, the Zahrat al-Finjan landfill in the Northern West Bank, toxic dumping grounds in Shuqba village, sewage pipelines in Baqa al-Sharqiyah, and Palestinian Authority officials in Ramallah, this multi-sited project reveals larger social and political orders of colonial occupation and the constellation of forces producing what Stamatopoulou-Robbins argues amounts to a siege. In Palestine, waste has become a political and agentic infrastructure, facilitating networks, affects, and differentiated experiences of occupation. Stamatopoulou-Robbins suggests the book can be read in two sections: Chapters 1, 3, and 5 as an "ethnographic cluster" exploring conventional waste infrastructures, like sanitary landfills, toxic dumps, and wastewater, and Chapters 2 and 4 representing non-normative definitions of waste infrastructures, like markets of second-hand colonial goods and informal exchanges of used bread. 978487C GJ0010.1177/1474474020978487cultural geographiesbook review essay book-review2020
Book Review Essay