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Abstract
My article draws on cultural production from South Africa, Brazil and India to test theorisations that read subjects and objects as ontologically comparable. Using the oceanic circulation of human waste products to link the above locales, I show how the use of junk by the urban poor shows evidence of a relationship with discarded objects that contests their national and transnational marginalisation. Concomitantly, I explore the ways in which aesthetic strategies by Ivan Vladislavíc, Mark Lewis and Tanya Zack, Vik Muniz, and Katherine Boo affirm the disruptive potential of objects while also suggesting the ways in which struggles against poverty continue to centre on humanist understandings of the subject.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. I also thank the convenors of the first JSAS conference, ‘Southern Africa beyond the West: Political, Economic and Cultural Relationships with the BRICS Countries and the Global South’, held in Livingstone, Zambia in August 2015, for the opportunity to present my work, and Dr M. Msiska for his editorial advice. Other iterations of this article were presented over the course of 2015, and I thank L. Green, S. Newell and E. Smuts for the ‘Dirt’ colloquium held at Stellenbosch University in April 2015, and my colleagues in the English Department’s ‘Nature Critical’ reading group. I wish to thank S. Nuttall, T. Wright and K. Sides for a workshop on the Anthropocene held at WiSER, Wits University, in November 2015. Thanks also to M. Samuelson for reading through drafts of the early project. Last but most definitely not least, I owe a debt to I. Hofmeyr for pointing me oceanwards.
Notes
1 J. Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2010).
2 D. Wilson and R. Purushothaman, ‘Dreaming with BRICs: The Path to 2050’,Global Economics, 99 (October 2003), available at http://www.goldmansachs.com/our-thinking/archive/archive-pdfs/brics-dream.pdf, retrieved 9 April 2016.
3 P. Bond, ‘BRICS: “Anti-Imperialist” or “Sub-Imperialist”?’, Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal, (20 March 2013), available at http://links.org.au/node/3265, retrieved 9 April 2016.
4 L.F. de Alencastro, ‘Brazil in the South Atlantic: 1550–1850’, trans. Emilio Sauri, Mediations, 23, 1
(2007), pp. 125–74.
5 P. Kershaw, S. Katsuhiko, S. Lee, J. Samseth and D. Woodring, ‘Plastic Debris in the Ocean’, United Nations Environment Programme, Yearbook (2011), available at http://staging.unep.org/yearbook/2011/pdfs/plastic_debris_in_the_ocean.pdf, retrieved 6 June 2017.
6 G. Froyland, R.M. Stuart and E. van Sebille, ‘How Well Connected is the Surface of the Global Ocean?’, Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, 24, 033126 (2014), available at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4892530, retrieved 9 April 2016.
7 OECD, ‘Global Waste on Pace to Triple by 2100’ (30 October 2013), available at http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/10/30/global-waste-on-pace-to-triple, retrieved 9 April 2016.
8 R. Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 2.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 5.
11 S. Connor, ‘Thinking Things’, Textual Practice, 24, 1 (2010), p. 5.
12 Ibid., p. 6.
13 B. Brown, ‘Thing Theory’, Critical Inquiry, 28, 1 (2001), pp. 1–22.
14 R. Felski, ‘Context Stinks!’, New Literary History, 42, 4 (2011), p. 589.
15 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 6.
16 Ibid., p. 4.
17 Connor, ‘Thinking Things’, pp. 3–4.
18 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 5.
19 M. Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, Boston and Henley, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966), pp. 2–3.
20 Connor, ‘Thinking Things’, p. 6. Connor notes that thing theory, even in Serres, privileges the subject even as it attempts to dismantle the ontological differences between subject and object.
21 K. Harrow, Trash: African Cinema from Below (Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press, 2013), p. 2.
22 I. Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys: The City of Johannesburg Unlocked (London, Portobello Books, 2006), p. 42.
23 S. Graham, ‘Layers of Permanence: Towards a Spatial–Materialist Reading of IvanVladislavić’s The Exploded View’, Mediations: Journal of the Marxist Literary Group, 24, 1 (2008), p. 116.
24 Vladislavić, Portrait with Keys, p.12.
25 Ibid., p. 25.
26 Ibid., p. 48.
27 Ibid., p. 72.
28 Ibid., p. 158.
29 Under colonialism and then apartheid, the city was reserved for whites, while black South Africans were relegated to the urban periphery in townships.
30 Samson prefers the term to ‘waste picker’ and ‘recycler’ because it acknowledges both the acts of labour performed and the broadness of their nature.
31 M. Samson, ‘Wasted Citizenship? Reclaimers and the Privatised Expansion of the Public Sphere’, Africa Development, 34, 3–4 (2009), p. 4.
32 Ibid., p.5.
33 Ibid., p. 20.
34 M. Lewis and T. Zack, Good Riddance, in series Wake Up, This is Joburg (Johannesburg, Fourthwall Books, 2015).
35 Ibid., p. 1.
36 Ibid., p. 8.
37 Ibid., p. 4.
38 Ibid., p. 8.
39 J. Butler, ‘Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance’ (unpublished lecture, Madrid, 2014), p. 3.
40 Ibid., pp. 16–17.
41 Bennett,Vibrant Matter, p. 21.
42 Ibid., pp. 22–3.
43 T. Kendall, ‘Cinematic Affect and the Ethics of Waste’, New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, 10, 1 (2012), p. 49.
44 Lewis and Zack, Good Riddance, p. 9.
45 Ibid., p. 13.
46 L.J. Bank, Home Spaces, Street Styles: Contesting Power and Identity in a South African City (Johannesburg, Wits University Press, 2011), p. 243.
47 Lewis and Zack, Good Riddance, p. 2.
48 Ibid., p. 22.
49 L. Walker (dir.), Waste Land (2010).
50 T. Bardini, Junkware (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2011), pp. 8–9.
51 V. Muniz, in L. Martin (ed.), Reflex: A Vik Muniz Primer (New York, Aperture, 2005).
52 Kendall, ‘Cinematic Affect’, p. 51.
53 Ibid., pp. 19–21.
54 K. Corbett, ‘“Gleaners” and “Waste”, the Post-Issue/Advocacy Documentary’, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 41, 3 (2013), pp. 128–35.
55 J. Silva, ‘Filmmaker Lucy Walker is making an IMPACT’, Huffington Post Impact (25 May 2011), available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jason-silva/filmmaker-lucy-walker-is-_1_b_689158.html, retrieved 9 April 2016.
56 F. Möeller, ‘Photo-Activism in the Digital Age: Visions from Rio de Janeiro’, in N.S. Love and M. Mattern (eds), Doing Democracy: Activist Art and Cultural Politics (Albany, SUNY Press, 2013), p. 44.
57 R. Huval, ‘Whatever Happened to … the Garbage Pickers from Waste Land?’, Independent Lens (15 June 2012), available at http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/whatever-happened-catadores-waste-land/, retrieved 9 April 2016.
58 M. Samson (ed.), Refusing to Be Cast Aside: Waste Pickers Organising Around the World (Cambridge, Mass., Women in Informal Employment, Globalizing and Organizing, 2009).
59 Samson, ‘Conclusion’, in ibid., p. 83.
60 Z. Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Discontents (Cambridge, Polity, 2014), pp. 39–40.
61 K. Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum (London, Portobello Books, 2013).
62 Ibid., pp. 250–52.
63 Ibid., p. 248.
64 G. Jones, ‘Where’s the Capital? A Geographical Essay’, The British Journal of Sociology, 65, 4 (2014), p. 731.
65 Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, p. 252.
66 P. Fruss, The Politics and Poetics of Journalistic Narrative (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1994).
67 J. Calkin, ‘Katherine Boo Interview’, Daily Telegraph, London, 1 June 2012, available at http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/authorinterviews/9295694/Katherine-Boo-interview.html, retrieved 9 December 2016.
68 R. Barthes, The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Oxford, Blackwell, 1986) pp. 141–8.
69 Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, p. 237.
70 D. Chakrabarty, ‘Of Garbage, Modernity and the Citizen’s Gaze’, Economic and Political Weekly, 27, 10–11 (1992), pp. 541–7.
71 Ibid., p. 544.
72 Ibid.
73 Ibid.
74 Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, p. 35.
75 Ibid., p. 170.
76 Ibid., p. 37.
77 Ibid., p.12.
78 Ibid., p. 86.
79 Ibid., p. 94.
80 Ibid., p. 249.
81 Ibid., p. 218.
82 Ibid., p. 155.
83 J.C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1990), pp. 1–17.
84 Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, p. 197.
85 In Behind the Beautiful Forevers, the survival of the individual or, at most, the family unit, dominates the actions of residents. No labour co-organisation exists. Jardim Gramacho’s catadores seek to protect the livelihoods of all workers in a movement that is simultaneously grassroots and transnational.
86 Bauman, Wasted Lives.