Garbage as Racialization

Abstract

Summary This essay examines parallels between the representation of garbage and the racialized production of the category of the human. In recent years, waste has become a ubiquitous metaphor for understanding the lives of the jobless poor, perceived as discarded by global capitalism and thereby rendered “disposable life.” The essay questions the conflation of waste with abjection through an ethnographic analysis of a film and art project produced on a garbage dump in Rio de Janeiro.