This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
Planet Earth has entered the time of the Anthropocene. For natural scientists, this means that human activity, taken as a whole, has come to rival geological and biophysical forces in its effect on the planet. Disturbing material comparisons communicate the deep weirdness of this fact. For example, there’s now enough concrete on the planet to produce a 2mm thick, full-scale …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
1. Toxicity names forces for which there is no remediation.
Ibrahim is a tour guide in the Senegalese capital, Dakar. His carefully crafted tour takes you around the city. But it builds steadily to what is clearly, for him, the grand finale. And indeed, what Ibrahim most wants you to see is a marvel: the Monument to the African …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
Waste is a tricky word. In our meditations in Somatosphere, waste hews toward its concrete sense as discard: material byproducts of some transformative process, metabolic or mechanical; things past the end of their wonted, wanted life. Quite literally, waste isn’t what it used to be. It hangs around when and (as Mary Douglas says of dirt) where it isn’t wanted. …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
I employed the category ‘detritus’ in the early 2000s to diagnose the different kinds of residues of racial capitalism with which people struggled in the shadows of South Durban’s oil refineries. These residues ranged from various attempts at documenting the effects of industrial pollution, to the many ways in which people confronted the embodied and sensual remains of apartheid’s racial …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
In July 2015 a Facebook campaign entitled selfie lixo (garbage selfie) was launched in Angola. It asked people to pose in front of piles of uncollected garbage in the capital, Luanda, in a bid to put pressure on the government to do something about the situation. The medium and its visuals were a mocking homage to the usual use of …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
Indian Ocean port cities are worlds of coral and glass. Consider Lamu or Zanzibar on the East African coast with their labyrinthine old towns where ornate buildings made of smooth grey coral stone stand in various states of ruin along narrow and winding lanes echoing long histories of trade and mobility. If coral indexes a distant past of commerce and …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
South Africa, 1994. Apartheid before, democracy after. Nonetheless, obstinate continuities stretch across this important rupture. Bisasar Road Landfill, the largest registered landfill on the African continent, constitutes a site of such a continuity, inviting obstinacies of various kinds. It is these obstinacies that have lured me to this particular “dump.”
Dumps, along with landfills, incinerators, waste-to-energy plants are technologies …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
Island. They are meditative, graspable and productive to think with. On the one hand, they are often conceptualized as the beginning of the world, sites of existential and utopian longing, tranquil and innocent: Paradise. On the other hand, they represent the end of the world, as sites of imprisonment and exile, places where contaminants are made to disappear, dumping grounds …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
For colonial officials in British East Africa, African excrement endangered public health because Africans were reckless defecators. The world was their toilet, and they simply went where they pleased. Indeed, in 1866, David Livingston suggested Zanzibar be renamed “Stinkibar”: “The stench from a mile and a half to two miles of sea-beach, which is the general depository of the filth …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
Cape Mongo is a multimedia installation that focuses on consumer waste as medium and subject. It is a complex artwork, comprising sculpture using found materials (mostly what viewers would consider waste or trash), performance, and video work. The main narrative feature of the work is a series of fantastical-looking creatures made from either glass, cardboard, tin cans, plastic, VHS tapes …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
Introduction
Urban man-made bodies of water such as lakes can be sources of aesthetic beauty and leisure and can boost a city’s economy and tourism industry. They satisfy what Alex Loftus has called the ‘sensuous human activity that fulfils particular historically defined social needs’ (Loftus, 2007: 43). But the same human activity and the intensification of urbanization have also transformed …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
If you’ve seen Hubert Sauper’s (2004) documentary film Darwin’s Nightmare you may remember the stark contrast he draws between the sterile disassembly line of a factory producing Nile perch fillets for export to Europe and the seething, smoky, maggoty miasma where Tanzanian women, men, and children work to dry and fry fish carcasses. You may also recall your own sense …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
Mining is a toxic business and gold mining is particularly noxious. Mercury and cyanide pollute river-ways and sentient bodies. The large-scale evacuation of earth often acidifies water tables, literally “lying waste” to land by making it unusable for agriculture and pastoralism. Elsewhere in this series, Claudia Gastrow, Jennifer Wenzel, and Lynn Thomas describe the political architecture of latent …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
The ocean has long been considered the ideal location for the disposal of waste—including, among many other things, treated and untreated sewage poured easily into the sea, the vast quantities of sand and earth displaced into continental margins by harbor dredging, and the irredeemable byproducts of nuclear reactions secretly sunk. The ocean’s vastness, viscerally encountered and culturally reproduced, has seemed …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
Waste and toxicity are foundational categories of knowledge for the Anthropocene. Consider how natural scientists approach the topic. Empirically, the “great acceleration” they’ve identified corresponds to a massive increase in human-generated wastes: carbon molecules, toxic chemicals, radioactive particles, plastics, and much more. Measuring molecular concentrations of these materials, and mapping these measurements onto models of earth systems (such as the …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
The building pictured below sat near Mack Avenue on Detroit’s far east side and, according to the municipal government, was an environmental hazard. Following years of complaints from area residents that the structure smelled of rotting garbage and attracted criminal activity, the building is slated for demolition. In mid-2017, a fifty-five-ton excavator piloted by a human operator knocked down the …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
In the late 1990s, a group of Japanese researchers set out to investigate whether small-scale gold mining operations near the shores of East Africa’s Lake Victoria were resulting in mercury contamination of local fish and human populations. The group included Dr. Masazumi Harada who began his medical career in the early 1960s by studying the devastating effects of severe mercury …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
It is increasingly impossible to think of the problem of waste, or discarded and denigrated materials, separately from the problem of race, or discarded and denigrated people. There are at least two ways to think about this association: in terms of proximity or consubstantiality and in terms of resemblance or metaphorical substitution. On the one hand, people and communities of …
This article is part of: Toxicity, Waste, and Detritus in the Global South: Africa and Beyond
Beaches are good places to think with about waste and ruination. They were once generically places of waste (in the etymological sense of “unoccupied, uncultivated”) while recognized as actants in processes of ruination—including erosion that produced their defining shingle and sand, the death and decay of what washes up on them, and the shipwrecks they induced. In the industrializing world …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology