The Elsewhere Is Black

“Solomon critically centers trash as a complex material relation to property and its historical and ongoing consolidation through whiteness and with whiteness as property. She shows how waste is bound to the lives of Black people as the refuse of capitalist production and consumption as surplus, filler, and discardable life. This book is, at the level of every sentence, urgent, necessary, brilliant, and devastating. I will think and learn from it for quite some time.” - J. T. Roane, author of Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place

“Expertly weaving ethnography with testimony and the historical archive, The Elsewhere Is Black takes the reader on a powerful journey between Virginia and Brooklyn, exposing violence, toxicity, and pain while eschewing a damage-centered narrative that eclipses possibility and selfhood. Marisa Solomon’s ambitious, wide-ranging, and incisive examination of life lived in the elsewhere of racial capital is a masterful intervention into the Black ecological condition that promises to catapult forward our understandings of Black disposability and becoming in the Anthropocenic environments of late US capitalism.” - Rosalind Fredericks, author of Garbage Citizenship: Vital Infrastructures of Labor in Dakar, Senegal

"This book offers us a necessary reading practice, one for reading place, land, ecology, and black life together." - Jade Nixon, Ethnic and Racial Studies