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 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?

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

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction: Introducing the Elsewhere  1
Flow  24
1. Toxic Culture  30
Infrastructure  59
2. Becoming Fill  65
Surplus  92
3. Revisions from Elsewhere  98
Disposal  133
4. Black Refractions  137
Junk  155
Conclusions: Fictions of Fabulous/Fabulative Ethnography  158
Notes  179
Bibliography  209
Index  239