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How do those pushed to the margins survive in contemporary cities? What role do they play in today’s 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 today’s 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.
A critical reading of the unstable structures that organize biological and social life This timely and radically interdisciplinary volume uncovers the aesthetics and politics of infrastructure. From roads and bridges to harbors and canals, infrastructure is conventionally understood as the public works that allow for the circulation of capital. Yet this naturalized concept of infrastructure, driven by capital’s restless expansion, is haunted by imperial tendencies to occupy territory, extract resources, and organize life. Infrastructure thus undergirds the living nexus of modernity in an ongoing project of racialization, affective embodiment, and environmental praxis. Rather than merely ma...
Food is a defining feature in every culture. Despite its very basic purpose of sustaining life, it directly impacts the community, culture and heritage in every region around the globe in countless seen and unseen ways, including the literature and narratives of each region. Across the African continent, food and foodways, which refer to the ways that humans consume, produce and experience food, were influened by slavery and forced labor, colonization, foreign aid, and the anxieties prompted by these encounters, all of which can be traced through the ways food is seen in narratives by African and colonial storytellers. The African continent is home to thousands of cultures, but nearly every one has experienced alteration of its foodways because of slavery, transcontinental trade, and colonization. Food and Foodways in African Narratives: Community, Culture, and Heritage takes a careful look at these alterations as seen through African narratives throughout various cultures and spanning centuries.
Offers a comprehensive introduction to the environmental humanities. It addresses the 21st century recognition of an environmental crisis.