Waste and Discard in Italy and the Mediterranean

«From the violence of growth and the mountains of garbage to migrant lives brutally cast away in the Mediterranean, what constitutes waste? Who defines and arranges its semantics? This collection of thoughtful essays takes us into the unsuspected depths of the question—the discarded returns to interrogate our lives while we continue our savage trashing of the planet. »

(Iain Chambers, Independent Scholar and Writer, former Professor of Cultural, Postcolonial and Mediterranean Studies at the University of Naples, L’Orientale)

«From the flea market to the nuclear waste dump, this insightful collection dives into Mediterranean stories of dirt, rot, decay, trash, junk, and toxic waste, finding critical lessons about politics, ethics, and contemporary values in the materialities of reviled, discarded and forgotten items. Across landscapes, genres, languages, and histories, the authors track heartbreaking instances of cultural and environmental erasure as well as powerful stories of political and material resistance. In a contemporary era of mass extinctions and ubiquitous PFOAs and microplastics, this choral meditation on the fateful dynamics of marginal but resistant matter speaks volumes. »

(Elena Past, Professor of Italian, Wayne State University)

Whether hidden or exposed, waste demands to be explored and understood vis-à-vis the wider social, economic, political, cultural, and material systems that shape everyday life.

This volume engages with the ambivalence embedded in and materialized by waste, its ambiguous ownership and temporalities. It interrogates popular and normative notions of waste and discard and offers insight into forms of ecology built around waste – in particular, with reference to the Italian and, more broadly, the Mediterranean area.

The contributions to the volume analyze questions of submerged/emerging «wasted lives», waste management and mismanagement in urban and suburban areas, and landscape conservation and erasure. Chapters also consider literary depictions of trash and filth as markers of class or otherness and filmic narratives of the wasteocene. The aim is to explore the locality of Italy and the Mediterranean within the wider, planetary system of relations that hinges on production and discard, accumulation, and waste.