Garbage in Popular Culture

Mehita Iqani

Description

Garbage in Popular Culture is the first book to explicitly link media discourse, consumer culture and the cultural politics of garbage in contemporary global society. It makes an original contribution to the areas of consumer culture studies, visual culture, media and communications, and cultural theory through a critical analysis of the ways in which waste and garbage are visually communicated in the public realm. Mehita Iqani examines three key themes evident in the global representation of garbage: questions of agency and activism, cultures of hedonism and luxury, and anxieties about devastation and its affect. Each theme is explored through a number of case studies, including zero-waste recycling campaigns communicated on Instagram, to fine art made with waste, popular entertainment festivals, tropical beach tourism, and films about oil spills and plastic waste in oceans. Iqani argues that we need a new vocabulary to think about what it means to be human in this new age of consumption-produced waste, and reflects on what rubbish allows us to learn about our relationship with the natural world.
Illustrations

1. Globalization, Consumption, and Media: Why Rubbish Matters

2. Agency and Action: Recycling Consumer Subjectivity through Waste

3. Hedonism and Luxury: Waste and Its Traces in Narratives of Pleasure

4. Devastation and Affect: Seeking Consumption in Oil and Plastic Trashscapes

5. Public Objects, Wasted Subjects, Uncertain Futures

References
Index

Sujets

• Media studies
• Popular culture

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438480190
• Langue: English

Extrait

GARBAGE IN POPULAR CULTURE
Garbage in
Popular Culture
Consumption and the Aesthetics of Waste
MEHITA IQANI
Cover image: Cape Mongo (2015) by Francois Knoetze.
Courtesy of Francois Knoetze.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
©2020 State University of New York Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Iqani, Mehita, author.
Title: Garbage in popular culture : consumption and the aesthetics of waste / Mehita Iqani.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020001181 (print) | LCCN 2020001182 (ebook) | ISBN 9781438480176 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781438480190 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Consumption (Economics)—Social aspects. | Refuse and refuse disposal—Social aspects.
Classification: LCC HC79.C6 I63 2020; (print) | LCC HC79.C6 (ebook) | DDC 306.3—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001181
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001182
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CONTENTS ILLUSTRATIONS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 1 GLOBALIZATION, CONSUMPTION, and MEDIA Why Rubbish Matters 2 AGENCY and ACTION Recycling Consumer Subjectivity through Waste 3 HEDONISM and LUXURY Waste and Its Traces in Narratives of Pleasure 4 DEVASTATION and AFFECT Seeking Consumption in Oil and Plastic Trashscapes 5 PUBLIC OBJECTS, WASTED SUBJECTS, UNCERTAIN FUTURES REFERENCES INDEX
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1. In a portrait shared on Instagram in April 2019, Lauren Singer shows four years of trash in a mason jar.
Figure 2. hunter-gatherer , Kai Lossgott, 2016. Production still from performance with wearable postconsumer plastic sculpture and found objects.
Figure 3. Thomas Hirschhorn, Too Too-Much Much , 2010.
Figure 4. Cape Mongo by Francois Knoetze, 2015.
Figure 5. iThemba Tower in Troyeville, Johannesburg.
Figure 6. The portrait of SWaCH waste collectors.
Figure 7. Thilafushi, Maldive’s Rubbish Island.
Figure 8. Sanur Beach, Bali, at dawn in 2018. The two figures are beach sweepers, removing trash before the tourists arrive.
Figures 9a and b. (Left) A sign reading “Leave No Trace” reminds those arriving at Afrika Burn that they are responsible for their own rubbish. (Right) The last bags of MOOP from my theme camp in 2018.
Figure 10. Before and after images of Burning Man festival in the Black Rock desert.
Figure 11. Nurdles litter a Hong Kong Beach in 2012.
Figure 12. The scene featured in the opening image of The Great Invisible . Deepwater Horizon burns while oil gushes into the Gulf of Mexico and ships try fruitlessly to put out the fire.
Figure 13. Satellite photo of the oil spill taken by NASA.
Figure 14. Harrowing scenes in the film Deepwater Horizon feature the exploding and burning oil rig against a black night sky and ocean, echoing the kind of visual documented in this photograph of flare-off gas at the site of drilling operations at the Deepwater.
Figure 15. A sample of floating plastic trash in the ocean.
Figure 16. Floating plastic megatrash in the Pacific, as documented from the air.
Figure 17. Production still from A Plastic Ocean , showing film producer Craig Leeson and scientist Jennifer Lavers examining the plastic found in the bellies of dead albatross chicks.
Figure 18. Striking Pikitup workers spread rubbish on the streets instead of collecting it as usual, in Johannesburg, in March 2016.
Figure 19. The Maldives as seen from space.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The academics, artists, environmentalists, writers, musicians, entrepreneurs, and critical thinkers I am lucky to have in my life and call my friends, students, and colleagues have shaped this book more than they know. There are too many to name, but I am deeply grateful to everyone who talked with me about the subject matter in this book; helped me shape my thinking and arguments; shared material, case studies, and ideas; encouraged me to start and stay with the writing; or inspired me in some way or other to capture into words the ideas in the pages that follow. A special thank you to my friends (or should I say, family) at Breezeblock, my neighborhood café in Brixton, Johannesburg, where I wrote and edited huge swathes of this book, buoyed by excellent coffee, food, sunshine in the winter, and what felt like a bottomless well of kindness from Keke Mamaleshoane and Azwi Netshirembe, in particular.
I participated in the “Sugarman” workshop on Toxicity and Detritus, which took place in Durban in 2016, organized by colleagues at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of Michigan, where I presented some early work relevant to this book.
I was privileged to have had the opportunity to work on the manuscript for this book during academic writing residencies at the Bellagio Center of the Rockefeller Foundation in 2018 and Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda in 2019, through the American Council for Learned Scholars’ African Humanities Programme. I am grateful to staff and fellow residents at both institutions for their support and intellectual generosity during my time with them. I am also grateful to the South African National Research Foundation for funding support during the time of writing this book.
I wrote a significant part of this book in Lamu, Kenya—a place that generously gave me both much inspiration and many new friends. I hope that somehow the work presented here can contribute in some tiny way to protecting places like it.
I would like to thank all the photographers, artists, activists, and public sector workers who gave explicit permission for me to include their images in this book, or who put their work into the public domain for fair use by researchers like me. Special thanks to Francois Knoetze for allowing me to feature his artwork on the cover.
I would not have been able to finalize this manuscript without the efficient and reliable assistance of Gabriel Shamu.
To David du Preez: thank you for being my Besten bester. Your love and partnership are constants in an inconstant world.
I dedicate this book to all out there on the frontlines working as best they are able for their fellow human beings in the quest to protect the environment.
1
Globalization, Consumption, and Media
Why Rubbish Matters
Most people on the planet have two things in common, both deeply embedded in the inescapably material nature of the human condition. The first is that we aspire to accumulate or possess things that, thanks to the power of market exchange in the global neoliberal economy, most often manifest as commodities. The second is that through our use, possession, and eventual utilization of those things, we produce some form of waste, which must then be disposed of. Wherever there is consumption, there is waste.
All people, from the most impoverished to the obscenely wealthy, through the day-to-day and often automatic decisions that we make, acquire things, use them, and throw what’s left of them away. To date, much critical consumer culture theory has devoted attention to questions linked to the accumulation and use of things (be they defined in the material, virtual, or experiential sense). This book aims to understand the culturally shared meanings attached to the detritus that is left behind once consumption has taken place, and thereby to expand our critical thinking both about consumption and about rubbish. By better understanding the two in relation to one another, new insights will be gleaned into the futures of consumption and material culture, the latter increasingly defined by the waste that it creates. Scholars have deployed frameworks from a wide range of disciplines in order to understand what objects mean to people, how and why they acquire and exchange them, and how their consumption practices fit into the bigger picture of a world shaped by the economics of late capitalism. In previous writing, I have contributed to these understandings by revealing the role that media texts, discourses, and narratives play in shaping popular, often “taken-for-granted” ideas about consumption and the individual’s place and role in the neoliberal economy. Some scholars have written about the ethics of consumption and questions of environmental sustainability in relation to consumption (Harrison, Newholm, Shaw, 2005; Guido, 2009; Barnett et al., 2010; Smart, 2010; Carrier Luetchford, 2012; Lewis Potter, 2013), and others have written about the role of waste and garbage in material culture studies, media studies, geography and anthropology, and cultural philosophy (as the rest of this chapter explores in detail). However, not enough theoretical work has yet been done about the role of postconsumer trash in the neoliberal age, and specifically about how that role—or those roles—are narrated in such a way as to enter the popular imagination and shape and define cultural discourse.
This book aims to fill that gap. It focuses on the question of what waste means in relation to consumer culture. More specifically, it asks how popular media narratives about postconsumer waste create and share specific notions about consumption and neoliberal culture. Through this intellec