Anthropocenic Discards: The Politics of Closure at Dakar’s Dump, Mbeubeuss
Topics: Urban Geography
, Cultural and Political Ecology
, Africa
Keywords: waste, Senegal, Anthropocene, commons
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Saturday
Session Start / End Time: 2/26/2022 02:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/26/2022 03:20 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 59
Authors:
Rosalind Fredericks, New York University
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Abstract
The massive, open-air garbage dump, Mbeubeuss, in Dakar, Senegal—one of Africa’s largest—is slated to be progressively closed over the next five years. Long the subject of intense contestation, the dump’s closure is a key element of the state’s effort to clean up and modernize the city, justified through its ecological and health benefits. The waste pickers who have forged their lives through this “negative commons” (Monnin 2021), see the dump’s closure instead as a move to eject the poor from the city, fashion its banlieue more attractive for investment, and grab the value built from the city’s detritus since 1968. They see a recent spate of tragic fires on the dump, moreover, as evidence that state plans for the dump have upended carefully honed practices harmonizing human and more-than-human forces, thereby angering the spirits (djinn) living on the dump. This paper draws on ethnographic research at Mbeubeuss over the last few years to explore the cosmotechnics of closure through specifically examining the waste-value dialectic (Gidwani and Marginati 2016) at stake in plans for the dump. As Anthropocenic work par excellence, waste picking evinces the violent disparities of Anthropocenic development and the uneven embodiment of unruly exposures. And yet, attempts to poach the value crafted in these negative commons are a double assault on already abjected bodies. Through unearthing delineations of waste and value embedded in both state planning practices and material practices of salvage, the paper probes the more-than-human politics of dismantling an Anthropocenic commons.
Anthropocenic Discards: The Politics of Closure at Dakar’s Dump, Mbeubeuss
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Virtual Paper Abstract
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