The Racial Life of Waste

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Africa will constitute the backdrop for discussing the markings and un-markings of waste and its disproportionate effects on Africans and African-descended peoples in The Racial Life of Waste. In particular, we will focus on how the racialization of the African body at the “inauguration of modernity” drew both on metaphorical and literal readings of waste. For instance, notions like pungence, impurity, darkness, dirt, emptiness, etc., commonly associated with the African body, situated the African outside the parameters of the “Human” (Wynter 2003). Descriptions of Africa as “the dark continent” (Stanley 1878), “the heart of darkness” (Conrad, 1899), “a place without history” (Trevor-Roper 1963), “the Whiteman’s grave” (Curtin 1963), to name a few negations (Achebe 1977), created the conditions that racialized the African qua Black body as waste. In the contemporary moment, these negations, which also imagined Africa as an empty continent, a “terra nullius” or “terra incognita” (Mudimbe 1987) have spilled over into the recent interplanetary obsession among billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, etc., to discharge “waste” into space because space is empty. If the African experiment is the foundation on which these extra-terrestrial projects on waste deposition are envisioned, we will discuss how the appearance of the “modern human” in the western imaginary coincided with the construct of “waste.” In the era of the European encounter, the incorporation of both the African human and the African continent into Western definitions of the human resulted in their equation or reduction to Waste. Hence, we will distinguish between “waste produced by humans” and “humans produced as waste,” a distinction that will show us that human-produced waste, otherwise known as “anthropogenic waste,” is not produced equally around the globe. For example, between 2000 to 2020, Africa, compared to the rest of the world, contributed only 3.9 percent of carbon emissions (Kamer 2022), making it the least polluting continent yet the most vulnerable paradoxically. These are the key questions we will consider: What intersections between race, class, gender, and history are at play in the production of waste? How does Africa, in general, and the African body in particular, embody the paradox of extraction and deposition? In a world where Africa is figured as a geographical “shithole,” how significant are these considerations in the pursuit of radical global environmental justice?