Mediatic Empire | “The Elsewhere is Black” with Marisa Solomon

This lecture is part of Mediatic Empire: Critical Inquiries into Environment, Technology, and Media Cultures, a five-part public lecture series organized by UBC’s Department of English Language & Literatures and Green College. View the full series schedule.

It is also a Dorothy L. Black Lecture. The Dorothy L. Black First Year English Speakers’ Series Endowment was established through a bequest from Dorothy L. Black. Committed to education throughout her life, Black earned her BA from UBC in 1952 and taught in Burnaby schools for more than 40 years.

Talk abstract

Dr. Marisa Solomon explores how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism. Focusing on the interconnected relations that make Black life disposable in the gentrified neighborhood of Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, and the Virginia Tidewater, a dumping ground for NYC’s trash, Solomon reveals how anti-Blackness is a settler colonial strategy for producing a threshold where ecological violence and risk of many kinds always accrue. Locating Black survival as a site from which alternative eco-political imaginations spring, she foregrounds how houseless Black people live and dream amidst waste’s daily accumulation. This talk, and the book more broadly, opens new ecological horizons to ask: What forms of environmentalism emerge when Black un/freedom has never been distant from waste?

Presenter

Dr. Marissa Solomon

Assistant Professor, Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University

Dr. Marisa Solomon is an assistant professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches courses in feminist intersectional science studies, environmental humanities, Black geographies, feminist theory, and queer of colour critique. Her new book, The Elsewhere is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life (Duke University Press, 2025), which received Duke University Press’s Scholar of Color First Book Award, considers ecological politics from the position of Black dispossession.

She has written a number of articles on the relationship between waste and Black life in the US, including “The Ghetto is a Gold Mine” for the Journal of Labor and Working-Class History and “Ecologies Elsewhere” for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. Her work also appears in a number of edited volumes such as Waste as Critique (Oxford University Press), Black Environmentalisms (forthcoming with Duke University Press) and The Politics of Disposability (forthcoming with Duke University Press). She is currently the director of Barnard’s Interdisciplinary Race and Ethnic Studies Minor, an editorial board member of Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) and Scholar and Feminist Online, as well as the former co-director of the Black Atlantic Ecologies Working Group at the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, where she was affiliated with the Earth Institute.

Moderator: Dr. Kimberly Bain, Assistant Professor, Department of English Language & Literatures, UBC