Sarah Harrison - Waste Matters: Urban margins in contemporary literature

How do those pushed to the margins survive in contemporary cities? What role do they play in todays increasingly complex urban ecosystems? Faced with stark disparities in human and environmental wellbeing, what form might more equitable cities take?

Waste Matters argues that contemporary literature and film offer an insightful and timely response to these questions through their formal and thematic revaluation of urban waste. In their creation of a new urban imaginary which centres on discarded things, degraded places and devalued people, authors and artists such as Patrick Chamoiseau, Chris Abani, Dinaw Mengestu, Suketu Mehta and Vik Muniz suggest opportunities for an inclusive urban politics that demands systematic analysis. Waste Matters assesses the utopian promise and pragmatic limitations of their as yet under-examined work in light of todays pressing urban challenges.

This book will be of great interest to scholars and students of English Literature, Postcolonial Studies, Urban Studies, Environmental Humanities and Film Studies.

Sarah K. Harrison completed a PhD in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA.

Routledge Environmental Humanities

Series editors: Iain McCalman and Libby Robin

A full list of titles in this series is available at: www.routledge.com/series/REH

Editorial Board

Christina Alt, St Andrews University, UK

Alison Bashford, University of Cambridge, UK

Peter Coates, University of Bristol, UK

Thom van Dooren, University of New South Wales, Australia

Georgina Endfield, University of Nottingham, UK

Jodi Frawley, University of Sydney, Australia

Andrea Gaynor, The University of Western Australia, Australia

Tom Lynch, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, USA

Jennifer Newell, American Museum of Natural History, New York, US

Simon Pooley, Imperial College London, UK

Sandra Swart, Stellenbosch University, South Africa

Ann Waltner, University of Minnesota, US

Paul Warde, University of East Anglia, UK

Jessica Weir, University of Western Sydney, Australia

International Advisory Board

William Beinart, University of Oxford, UK

Sarah Buie, Clark University, USA

Jane Carruthers, University of South Africa, Pretoria, South Africa

Dipesh Chakrabarty, University of Chicago, USA

Paul Holm, Trinity College, Dublin, Republic of Ireland

Shen Hou, Renmin University of China, Beijing

Rob Nixon, University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA

Pauline Phemister, Institute of Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh, UK

Deborah Bird Rose, University of New South Wales, Australia

Sverker Sorlin, KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

Helmuth Trischler, Deutsches Museum, Munich and Co-Director, Rachel Carson Centre, LMU Munich University, Germany

Mary Evelyn Tucker, Yale University, USA

Kirsten Wehner, Head Curator, People and the Environment, National Museum of Australia

The Routledge Environmental Humanities series is an original and inspiring venture recognising that todays world agricultural and water crises, ocean pollution and resource depletion, global warming from greenhouse gases, urban sprawl, overpopulation, food insecurity and environmental justice are all crises of culture.

The reality of understanding and finding adaptive solutions to our present and future environmental challenges has shifted the epicenter of environmental studies away from an exclusively scientific and technological framework to one that depends on the human-focused disciplines and ideas of the humanities and allied social sciences.

We thus welcome book proposals from all humanities and social sciences disciplines for an inclusive and interdisciplinary series. We favour manuscripts aimed at an international readership and written in a lively and accessible style. The readership comprises scholars and students from the humanities and social sciences and thoughtful readers concerned about the human dimensions of environmental change.

Sarah K. Harrison

I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at the University of WisconsinMadison where this book first took shape. Tejumola Olaniyan provided me with guidance and insight, and I am grateful for his continued mentorship. I am also grateful to Rob Nixon for his generous support of this project, and Nirvana Tanoukhi and Susan Stanford Friedman for their help and advice.

Thank you to Gwenola Caradec, Emily Clark, Krista Kauffmann, Mike Opest and Christa Tiernan for their friendship and support, especially when it was most needed.

Special thanks must go to my family, especially Mum, Dad and Ross who have supported me in countless ways, but always with love and laughter. Lastly, I must thank Denis, for encouragement, patience and perspective; and Faye, for joyful distraction. You both make nothing else, and everything else, matter.

An earlier version of appeared in Research in African Literatures 43.2 (2012). I am grateful to Indiana University Press for permission to reprint that material here.