Overview

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 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? Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award

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9781478029137

Table of Contents

Reviews

""Expertly weaving ethnography with testimony and the historical archive, The Elsewhere Is Black takes the reader on a powerful journey between Virginia and Brooklyn, exposing violence, toxicity, and pain while eschewing a damage-centered narrative that eclipses possibility and selfhood. Marisa Solomon's ambitious, wide-ranging, and incisive examination of life lived in the elsewhere of racial capital is a masterful intervention into the Black ecological condition that promises to catapult forward our understandings of Black disposability and becoming in the Anthropocenic environments of late US capitalism.""--Rosalind Fredericks, author of Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal ""By critically centering trash as a complex material relation to property and its historical and ongoing consolidation through whiteness and with whiteness as property, Marisa Solomon shows how waste is bound to the lives of Black people as the refuse of capitalist production and consumption as surplus, refuse, filler, and discardable life. This book is, at the level of every sentence, urgent, necessary, brilliant, and devastating. I will think and learn from it for quite some time.""--J. T. Roane, author of Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place

Author Information

Marisa Solomon is Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.

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