Garbage as Racialization

Abstract

SummaryThis essay examines parallels between the representation of garbage and the racialized production of the category of the human. In recent years, waste has become a ubiquitous metaphor for understanding the lives of the jobless poor, perceived as discarded by global capitalism and thereby rendered “disposable life.” The essay questions the conflation of waste with abjection through an ethnographic analysis of a film and art project produced on a garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro.

Toward an economic anthropology of wisdom

“…The work of catadores necessitated touching, breathing, smelling, sinking into, and living the dump, with all the dirt that this work entailed. It meant engaging the materialities of garbage that were simultaneously toxic and life-giving (Millar, 2020).…”

‘Accumulation by appropriation’: The integration of recyclable-waste collector cooperatives in Salvador, Brazil, and the right to the city

“…The many concepts of waste (as abject, governable object, hazard, disorder, out of place, filth, risk, fetish, resource, and commodity) that Moore (2012) identifies in her review on the new geographies of waste are concepts that also describe the way in which black people in Brazil have been historically objectified as human waste. Working with garbage or undertaking manual labor perceived as dirty work (as in domestic service) and being unemployed are two (also gendered and classed) positions that are highly racialized in Brazil (Millar, 2021). Therefore, the racialization of recyclable-waste collectors in Salvador is not only based on their blackness but also on their wageless, abject working conditions.…”

“…As Mbembe (2011: 190) argues, “squandering and wasting black lives has been an intrinsic part of the logic of capitalism, especially in those contexts in which race is central to the simultaneous production of wealth and of superfluous people.” Among recent studies that have examined the intersection between race, waste, and value, most have examined these questions from the perspective of environmental justice, either within the context of factory work (Vasudevan, 2019) or other toxic urban environments (Amuzu, 2018; Dillon, 2014) or from within a more geopolitical perspective that tackles North/South divisions of labor and the unequal geographies of waste (Calafate-Faria, 2019; Gregson and Crang, 2015). Other recent studies have examined how racialization plays out in the livelihoods and struggles of waste workers (Dunajeva and Kostka, 2022; Gupta, 2022; Millar, 2021; Resnick, 2021).…”

“…In this sense, De Jesus represents the gendered and racialized dimensions of the waste workers’ indetermined, dynamic embodiments of not-value, anti-value and value-in-the-making. As Millar (2021) argues, we must be careful in not reducing waste and waste workers to negativity, abjection, and nonbeing. Instead, she suggests approaching waste in its multiple embodiments: “as a fleshy existence that defies domestication and transcendence” (p. 19).…”