Abstract
This chapter examines several recent works, both fictional and non-fictional, that foreground issues of recycling and waste disposal in contemporary China—particularly in relation to the migrant labourers who frequently live near or even in China’s open-air waste dumps. The focus is on how these representations of municipal waste, which is invariably figured as an object of disgust and revulsion, are interwoven with themes of beauty and desire. The chapter suggests that a dialectics of refuse as both garbage and recyclables offers a way of approaching both the environment as such and the Anthropocene—the latter being understood as an environment that has been nearly irreversibly transformed by human activity.
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Notes
- 1.
Emily C. Dooley and Carl MacGowan, “Long Island’s infamous garbage barge of 1987 still influences laws,” Newsday, 22 March 2017, https://projects.newsday.com/long-island/long-island-garbage-barge-left-islip-30-years-ago/
- 2.
Dooley and MacGowan, “Long Island’s infamous garbage barge of 1987.”
- 3.
Wang Jiuliang, “Beijing Besieged by Garbage,” Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review no. 1, http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/photo-essay/beijing-besieged-garbage/statement
- 4.
Wang Jiuliang, “Beijing Besieged by Garbage.”
- 5.
Christen Cornell, “The Affluent and the Effluent: Wang Jiuliang’s Beijing Besieged by Waste,” senses of cinema, issue 63, July 2012, http://sensesofcinema.com/2012/miff2012/the-affluent-and-the-effluent-wang-jiuliangs-beijing-besieged-by-waste/
- 6.
Ji Dan’s assistance is alluded to elliptically within the documentary, though she herself never appears on camera. See, also, Maya Eva Gunst Randolph, “CinemaTalk: A Conversation with Filmmaker Ji Dan,” DGenerate Films, http://dgeneratefilms.com/critical-essays/cinematalk-a-conversation-with-ji-dan
- 7.
See Laura Parker and Kennedy Elliot, “Plastic Recycling is Broken. Here’s How to Fix It,” National Geographic, 20 June 2018, https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/china-plastic-recycling-ban-solutions-science-environment/
- 8.
“From Green Fence to Red Alert: A China Timeline,” Resource Recycling, 13 February 2018, https://resource-recycling.com/recycling/2018/02/13/green-fence-red-alert-china-timeline/
- 9.
Livia Albeck-Ripka, “Your Recycling Gets Recycled, Right? Maybe, or Maybe Not,” New York Times, 29 May 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/29/climate/recycling-landfills-plastic-papers.html
- 10.
John Tierney, “Recycling is Garbage,” New York Times, 30 June 1996, https://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/30/magazine/recycling-is-garbage.html?pagewanted=all
- 11.
Richard A. Denison and John F. Ruston, “Recycling is Not Garbage,” New York Times, 1 October 1997, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/400100/recycling-is-not-garbage/; Alex Hutchinson, “Is Recycling Worth It? PM Investigates its Economic and Environmental Impact,” Popular Mechanics, 13 November 2008, https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a3752/4291566/
- 12.
See Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), and Jacques Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 112.
Bibliography
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Rojas, C. (2019). The World Besieged by Waste: On Garbage, Recycling, and Sublimation. In: Lo, KC., Yeung, J. (eds) Chinese Shock of the Anthropocene. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-6685-7_2
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