‘Towards a Political Poetics of Waste in South Africa, India and Brazil’
Megan Jones
Department of English
Stellenbosch University
The paper provides an overview of the politics of waste in South Africa, and to a lesser extent India and Brazil. Situating itself within the framework of environmental justice, the paper considers the after-lives of commodities— how these are disposed of, circulated and repurposed. Reading for cultural and literary evocations of residue, wreckage and junk, it limns the ways in which the “commodity as waste” confirms or unsettles local and global configurations of power and prosperity. Forms of consumption and destruction signal the marginalisation of poor communities– concomitantly the reconfiguration of the commodity suggests resilient modes of contestation. The paper’s geographical orientation interrogates the socio-economic discourses of BRICS aligned states which, far from challenging “Western Imperialism”, reproduce the conditions of neoliberal market capitalism.
The paper will track the production of texts from the last fifteen years, co-incidentally with the emergence or expansion of theories of environmental justice, transnationalism and the global South in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The paper uses as its framing motif the oceanic circulation of plastic detritus, discovered in 2010’s Five Gyres project (immense vortices of plastic waste in the North and South Atlantic, the North and South Pacific and Indian Oceans). Following work by South African, Indian and Brazilian scholars on oceanic transnational encounters, the project traces the movement of waste across the Indian Ocean and South Atlantic. Thus the study considers the affinities and disjunctures in narratives from South Africa, India and Brazil as a way of contrasting discourses of international economic development with everyday modes of affect and conviviality. The project thus asks what literatures from the South can do to contest and rescript the narratives imposed upon them by “the North” while also resisting national and international alliances that all too often privilege capital over the well-being of citizens. The environment is only one node through which to read across and between geographies and temporalities. How do those at the margin challenge discourses of privilege through affective and material strategies? What theories might be generated that delineate a politics and poetics of waste emerging from the South?
