The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life

By Marisa Solomon

Book Overview

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 a 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?

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1478029137
• ISBN13: 9781478029137
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.16 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"