This seminar will look at culture through the lens of waste, examining how value, pecuniary or otherwise, has accrued to certain objects or categories in markets over time. Drawing on approaches from a variety of disciplines to examine the history and material culture of waste, we will engage with its presentation in literature and cinema. We will consider labor, sanitation, waste management, recycling, and environmental justice with a focus on cultural discourses of waste and its role in artistic production. Texts can include, but will not be limited to, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Upton Sinclair, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt, Isaac Asimov, Latife Tekin, and Emine Sevgi Özdamar. We will also watch films featuring waste workers, whose constrained mobility contrasts with the circulation of resources and revenue in the global recycling business. Students will be expected to introduce their own related materials, and to participate in a joint research project. A good introduction to the topic is John Scanlan’s book On Garbage (2005).

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