ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the temporality of waste in African and Afrodiasporic imaginings beginning with Aimé Césaire’s 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. From the pustules of Césaire’s infected Caribbean landscape, to the shit and spit that ooze through Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) and Ousmane Sembène’s Xala (1973), waste matter provides a powerful figure for anxieties about the future of disposable people and landscapes. In more recent works, such as Wanuri Kahiu’s film Pumzi (2009) and Nnedi Okorafor’s fantasy Who Fears Death (2010), waste matter is imbued with a new significance: rather than projecting fears about stagnation, it suggests a view of time as malleable and open to human intervention. These works call for a risky, life-affirming embrace of wet matter and a reconsideration of the future of waste.
