Africana Studies Black Studies Speaker Series

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 u n freedom has never been distant from waste?