ABSTRACT
The scientists became public figures, and frequently shared the stories of the afterlives of the barrels and the muck on national television and in the press. Toxic waste impeded clear thought precisely because the residents of Lebanon perceived it to be unpredictable, dangerous, and uncontainable. Postcolonial literary scholar Rob Nixon poignantly identifies a radical form of exile without even moving, of being “stranded in a place stripped of the very characteristics that made it inhabitable.” Communities inhabiting these wastelands have lost not only land and resources, but also each other. The cancer epidemic in villages along the river banks of the Litany in south Lebanon and the Beka‘ regions, for instance, exemplifies this displacement. The incomparable Michelle Murphy coins “chemical infrastructures” to tie the molecular alterations of toxic exposures to political and economic structures, between “moments of production and consumption” and movements across “scales of life” and "national borders".
