Waste and Discard in Italy and the Mediterranean

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

«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 questionthe 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.

Auteur

Damiano Benvegnù is Reader in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland.

Marta Cariello is Associate Professor of English Literature at Università della Campania «Luigi Vanvitelli», Naples, Italy.

Matteo Gilebbi is Senior Lecturer in Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, USA.

Graziella Parati is Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, USA.

Contenu
Contents: Pasquale Verdicchio: Migration, Environment, Representation: A 'sea change into something rich and strange' - Graziella Parati: Flotsam: Bodies, Trash, and Mediterranean Migrations - Rebecca Falkoff: We'll Always Have Florence: Asbestos, Abatement, and Obsolete Objects at the Piazza dei Ciompi Market - Sophia Maxine Farmer: Conserving Fascism's Legacy: The Politics of Waste, Preservation, and Erasure - Dylan Gilbert: Polluted Lands, Poisoned Futures: A Trans-Corporeal Case Study of Scanzano Jonico's Antinuclear Protests - Carmine Di Biase: Solid Waste Comes to Life in Alessandro Casola's 'A Munnezza - Anna Chiafele: Carlotto's Perdas de Fogu: Toxicity and National Security in the Mediterranean Basin - Simonetta Falasca-Zamponi: On the Logic of Disposability: Gomorrah's Invisible Risks - Martino Lovato: Trash as a Marker of the Third- World Condition in Sonallah Ibrahim's Dhat - Vasiliki Petsa: 'A washed pig returns to the mud': The Working-Class in Greek Literature in the Interwar Years and the 1980s - Laura Di Bianco: Currents in Italian Cinema of the Wasteocene: The Vice of Hope by Edoardo De Angelis - Ilaria Puliti: Aesthetics of Toxicity: Disposable Ships and Car Wrecks in Frammartino's Il dono - Gabriele Geminiani: The Museum of the Rediscovered Objects and Its Inspiring 'History of the Vanquished'.