The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781478032465)

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 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?

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award

Author: Marisa Solomon
ISBN-10: 1478032464
ISBN-13: 9781478032465
Publisher: Duke University Press
Language: English
Published: 09/30/2025
Pages: 256
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.98lbs