The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life

by Marisa Solomon

Overview

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?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781478029137
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	09/30/2025
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

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

Table of Contents

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

What People are Saying About This

Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place - J. T. Roane

“By critically centering trash as a complex material relation to property and its historical and ongoing consolidation through whiteness and with whiteness as property, Marisa Solomon shows how waste is bound to the lives of Black people as the refuse of capitalist production and consumption as surplus, refuse, filler, and discardable life. This book is, at the level of every sentence, urgent, necessary, brilliant, and devastating. I will think and learn from it for quite some time.”