The ecological, social, and aestheticfunctions of garbage in literature and film from Argentina to Mexico

 

This book looks atthe role of waste in Latin American cultural texts from the twentieth andtwenty-first centuries and makes the case for foregrounding trash as an objectof analysis in literary and cultural studies in Spanish America and Brazil. Byconsidering how writers and filmmakers engage with the theme, Micah McKay arguesthat garbage illuminates key limits related to the region's experience with contemporarycapitalism.

Recognizingtrash as an important social reality, McKay traces its appearance in a diverse rangeof products: novels and documentary films with dumps as settings, short storieswhose main characters are garbage pickers, and works that portray writing as aprocess of piecing together found materials. McKay argues that waste and theproblems it poses are key to understanding marginalization, political struggle,and the production of aesthetic value.

Drawingon insights from material ecocriticism, discard studies, and biopolitics, McKaytheorizes that trash opens a space of reflection on what it means to be human,the possibilities for building community amid catastrophe, gendered notions oflabor and care, and the pitfalls of neoliberal environmentalism. McKay shows how trashin literature and film helps readers and viewers contemplate the limits of howwe inhabit the planet.

 

Publicationof this work made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the AmericanRescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.