The Elsewhere Is Black

In <i>The Elsewhere Is Black</i> 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 a 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?