ABSTRACT
This essay draws upon ethnographic accounts of trash fires in the occupied West Bank to examine how the term “toxic heritage” can help us understand the politics of such fires. Trash fires’ health and environmental effects are ways in which fires leave indexical signs after they stop burning. Yet heritage is more than an index of something having occurred. Heritage connotes ownership. It requires human affiliation. As a form of waste, trash has a similar defining characteristic: its existence implicates the existence of those who produced it or who relate to it after production. Both heritage and trash thus raise questions about who continues to relate to them. Trash fires as toxic heritage invite us to consider who or what constitutes fires’ possessor after extinguishment, and what politics possessorship enacts. On the one hand, trash fires articulate a toxic life politics that harnesses the potential for ecological damage to articulate and materialize political claims. On the other hand, trash fires are the toxic heritage of settler colonialism.
