The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life
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?
- Author(s)
- Marisa Solomon
- Publication Year
- 2025
- Publication date
- September 30, 2025
- Pages
- 272
- Binding
- Paperback
- Language
- English
- Publisher
- Duke University Press
- ISBN
- 9781478032465
- Dimensions
- 5.98 × 0.59 × 9.02 in
- Weight
- 0.79 lb
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