Overview

Over the last twenty-five years, garbage infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal, has taken center stage in the struggles over government, the value of labor, and the dignity of the working poor. Through strikes and public dumping, Dakar's streets have been periodically inundated with household garbage as the city's trash collectors and ordinary residents protest urban austerity. Often drawing on discourses of Islamic piety, garbage activists have provided a powerful language to critique a neoliberal mode of governing-through-disposability and assert rights to fair labor. In Garbage Citizenship Rosalind Fredericks traces Dakar's volatile trash politics to recalibrate how we understand urban infrastructure by emphasizing its material, social, and affective elements. She shows how labor is a key component of infrastructural systems and how Dakar's residents use infrastructures as a vital tool for forging collective identities and mobilizing political action. Fleshing out the materiality of trash and degraded labor, Fredericks illuminates the myriad ways waste can be a potent tool of urban control and rebellion.

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9781478000990

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Reviews

Garbage Citizenship isn't solely about urban rubbish collection in Senegal's capital. The book uses waste collector strikes and activism to explore broader effects of labour relations, citizen advocacy, neoliberal reform, and religious understandings of purity and pollution. -- Christine Ro * Environment & Urbanization *

Offering a thorough and highly original reading of urban politics in Dakar, Senegal, Rosalind Fredericks captures the cultural and political charge of waste, revealing how it comes to be a potent symbol of public life. She moves beyond the increasingly commonplace characterization of 'people as infrastructure' to identify how garbage emerges as a key field in which struggles over the terms of urban order and disorder, freedom and constraint, self-determination and state oversight, private and public life, moral value and moral disregard, all play out. An impressive and insightful work. --Brenda Chalfin, author of Neoliberal Frontiers: An Ethnography of Sovereignty in West Africa Garbage Citizenship is a major intervention that proposes new ways of thinking about religion, labor, community, and citizenship at the intersections of public health and the political economy of garbage collection disposal, infrastructures, and workforce. It's an engaging and perceptive ethnography of material desires and ethical contradictions examined through the stories of the various actors involved in the municipal and state politics in the era of neoliberal reform. --Mamadou Diouf, Columbia University

Author Information

Rosalind Fredericks is Associate Professor of Geography and Development Studies at New York University and coeditor of The Arts of Citizenship in African Cities: Infrastructures and Spaces of Belonging and Les arts de la citoyenneté au Sénégal: Espaces contestés et civilités urbaines.

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