waste/recycling, ecologies, and capitalo(bs)cene poetics

Question 1

C framed by 2 gigantic heterotopias:

Answer 1

rubbish dump & Will’s floating island

Question 2

heterotopia, df according to Foucault

Answer 2

(3rd principle) “capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible”

+ (4th principle) “heterotopias are most often linked to
slices in time — which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies.

The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” / “Opposite these heterotopias that are
linked to the accumulation of time, there are those linked, on the contrary, to time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival.

These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal [chroniques]”.

Heterotopias = counter-spaces to normative spaces. And in many ways, waste (and places which house it) = profoundly liminal spaces.

Question 3

In case of C, these spaces of waste profoundly linked to

Answer 3

eco-poet(h)ics of novel which engages w/ecological Qs & foregrounds many diff forms of recycling. So “dump” & island v much heterotopias.

Question 4

“rubbish dump” on which Pricklebush built 1st introduced as space of possibility + innovative forms of recycling but AW writing this novel in full awareness of waste colonialism (“In its most common usage, usually by actors in formal governments and NGOs, the term waste colonialism is used to describe the transboundary disposal of a variety of hazardous and toxic wastes, including electronic-waste, persistent organic pollutants (POPs), industrial waste, decommissioned ships, municipal solid waste, radioactive waste, and other toxic waste

Answer 4

In these uses of the term, waste
colonialism, as well as its sister terms garbage imperialism, toxic colonialism, nuclear colonialism,
and toxic terrorism, among others, are almost always about the transboundary movement of waste
from areas of privilege and affluence to areas with lower economic status and influence, and
discussions tend to focus on legislative solutions and channels” – definition from Discard studies
website).

Question 5

As Discard Studies website shows, we think we are familiar w/waste because we produce it every
day, but it is mostly hidden from sight, especially the “wider social, economic, political, cultural, and material systems that shape waste and wasting”. Also, important to think critically about

Answer 5

recycling – not so much about how much people recycle (or don’t) but about why recycling is considered good in the 1st place

Question 6

“The field of discard studies is united by a critical framework that questions premises of…

Answer 6

…what seems normal or given, and analyzes the wider role of society and culture, including social norms, economic systems, forms of labor, ideology, infrastructure, and power in definitions of, attitudes
toward, behaviors around, and materialities of waste, broadly defined. As its starting point, discard studies holds that waste is not produced by individuals and is not automatically disgusting, harmful, or morally offensive, but that both the materials of discards and their meanings are part of wider sociocultural-economic systems. Our task is to interrogate these systems for how waste comes to be, and our work is often to offer critical alternatives to popular and normative notions of waste”

These questions are precisely what AW invites us to engage with in C. What wider socioculturaleconomic systems are exposed in C? Logic of settler colonialism + manufacture of waste (and what can be discarded, physically & epistemically), what can be recycled (materially & in terms of poetics).

1 Rubbish dump
2 Will’s floating island
3 Capitalo(bs)cene poet(h)ics – the mine
4 Indigenous/settler colonial ontologies: transformation & recycling

Question 7

Rubbish dump

Answer 7

Angel Day’s enthusiasm for dump (“there she could get anything her heart desired – for free” p14) ironically parrots language of consumerism/advertising in which objects, not emotions or people, are predicated as what the “heart desires”, the commodity culture that puts a price on everything and the implicit waste this whole system generates.

Question 8

Angel Day’s attitude jars with that of narrator in C1 when she describes situation of Phantom house: “a human dumping-ground next to the town tip” (p4)

Illustrates?

Answer 8

politics of alienation of Aboriginal communities, deliberate policies of distancing & estrangement from centres of power & non-Indigenous habitations

(Verb/noun “dump” used no less than 4 times, polyptoton, + word “trash”, & reinforces disregard & ultimately attempted dehumanization of Indig by settlers – “foreign infestation”, like vermin.)

Question 9

2nd description “All choked up, living piled up together in trash humpies made of tin, cloth, and plastic too, salvaged from the rubbish dump” – phrasal verbs (choke up, pile up) evoke

Answer 9

promiscuity and “trash humpies” reads as a pleonasm thru paranomasia (hump -> dump), but already even here vb “salvage” suggests that despite humble habitation, Number One house involved in process of rescuing, recovering, recuperating refuse. Maybe something to be done here on “refuse” (n) and
“refuse” (vb)? (Come back to this on Q of agencies & resistance.)

Question 10

paranomasia

Answer 10

is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use of homophonic, homographic, metonymic, or figurative language. A pun differs from a malapropism in that a malapropism is an incorrect variation on a correct expression, while a pun involves expressions with multiple (correct or fairly reasonable) interpretations. Puns may be regarded as in-jokes or idiomatic constructions, especially as their usage and meaning are usually specific to a particular language or its culture.

Question 11

AD’s resourcefulness (see top p15 – “got the family thu the Wet as dry as a bone”) & enthusiasm co-opted by “Bureaucratic people” working in/for “Aborigines department” (p16) as example for other Indigenous Aus to follow. Patronizing nature of this discourse revealed in phrases

Answer 11

“blackfella advancement” and “Aborigines department” (originally created in 1896 and was changed in 1936 to Department of Native Affairs, in 1955 to Department of Native Welfare, in 1972 to Aboriginal Affairs Authority, then department, in 2002 to the Department of Indigenous Affairs, in 2013 to the Department of Aboriginal Affairs and, finally, in 2017 to the Department
of Planning, Lands and Heritage” – comment here on nomenclature & what it reveals about politics).

Question 12

Patronizing attitude compounded by utilitarian value placed by State on AD’s foraging & recycling: “She became a prime example of government policies at work and to prove it, they came and took pictures of her” (p16)

Answer 12

Irony underlying this statement is that the real gov policies
are not about “advancement” – predicated upon Capitalist notions of modernity – but about ensuring that Aboriginal communities are marginalized, and in that sense, AD & her house built on scraps from nearby dump really = “prime example” of how governments neglect Indigenous citizens of Oz :“government policies at work”.

Question 13

discourses on waste & refuse being explored here by AW:

Answer 13

• “dumping” of Ab Oz in marginalized spaces
• waste colonialism (Ab Oz citizens good for picking through this refuse and recycling what settler Oz rejects)
• a counter-narrative of the endless possibilities of recuperation created by waste (& of discourse of recycling as environmentally friendly) which does not in any way sugarcoat extreme poverty which produces such resourcefulness.

Question 14

As to content of rubbish to be found in rubbish dump, food, storybooks, cut down oleander hedges, clock & Madonna statue all indicate that

Answer 14

almost every aspect of settler colonial life can be considered refuse, whether food (in excess), stories, bureaucratic papers, religion etc. But what
seems to attract AD to the dump is the potential of using this waste to become more like Uptown, so that even in her defiance there is a note of subservience to/interest in settler colonial ways of living: when she takes the clock she believes, and hopes that, “no one in the Phantom family
would be guessing the time anymore from where the sun sat in the sky” (p22) and when she spies the statue of Mary she imagines that “they would become like the white people” whose praying made them prosperous: “This was how white people had become rich” (p22).

Statue becomes imbued with talismanic status (indirect ironic commentary on spiritual sterility of Uptown, who have literally discarded religious/spiritual beliefs, in contrast with strong spiritual beliefs of Indig).

Question 15

Possible to perceive some irony later in same chapter as she moves about, scouring the surroundings for “robbers” & checking for mvt in “the distortion of haphazard, mass waste” (p23). In effect, this “mass waste” produces a “distorting” effect which encourages AD to succumb
to sirens of settler colonial consumer culture. For all that, she also sees herself as custodian of

Answer 15

“inheritance of antiquity” (of the kind written “on rock” by the elders, p26) & this “landscape chiselled deep into their faces and the legacy of ancestral creation loaded into their senses. She guarded those whose fractured spirits cried of rape, murder and the pillage of their traditional lands” (p26).
AD therefore = profoundly ambivalent character

Question 16

Rubbish dump can be seen as

Answer 16

a wasteland where settlers dump their rubbish, after having
“distorted” Indigenous claims to land & rendered it as inhabitable as possible. See Bruiser’s outrageous demand that “they (the Pricklebush) live like everyone else” (p35). Impossible, of course, thanks to people like Bruiser who actively marginalize them and prevent them from living
in decent conditions.

Question 17

rubbish dump = also sort of contagion/contamination where rubbish dump literally rubs off (linguistically) on others: narrator describes JM + crew as “a lot of nuisance dogs … they were nothing but rubbish” (p51) but then we move from noun to verb:

Answer 17

“old people on Westside rubbished those people on Eastside” who “derived from the genes of trash” (back to noun), and then to adj: “his rubbish blood”. Polyptoton – increases this effect of contagion & suggests internalization by Indig Oz of discourse of unworthiness as synonymous with waste

Question 18

the rubbish dump can be considered a heterotopia as Foucault defines it:

Answer 18

many more layers of meaning than those that initially meet the eye – evidence of settler colonial consumerism & excess, of Indigenous resourcefulness born out of marginalization on their own land, a space of
tensions among Pricklebush, an “eyesore” for Uptown, a space too of inter-special connections (seagulls p18, “fly squadrons p25). Almost a museum of waste (museums for Foucault exist in and out of time as built to preserve and withstand pressures of time).

Question 19

Will’s floating island

Answer 19

As already mentioned (in “Territories”), W’s island = interstitial space/heterotopia/parodic terra nullius.

Island made up of motley assemblage of objects and materials: plastic, wood, glass etc. Like his mother, Will has to forge his own survival from this waste. Semiotics of ruin here: ruined political landscape as much as anything else, but ruined mine (thanks to Will’s activism) constitutes an
act of resistance to continued colonialism. For anyone interested on reading more on this, see Laura Ann Stoler’s book Imperial Debris, where she argues that ruin is not “what is left” but in fact “what people are left with”. Ann Laura Stoler’s introduction is “a manifesto, a compelling
call for postcolonial studies to expand its analytical scope to address the toxic but less perceptible corrosions and violent accruals of colonial aftermaths, as well as their durable traces on the material environment and people’s bodies and minds” (from Duke Uni Press website). What we
clearly see AW doing in C.

Question 20

She affirms that we are trained “to be alert to the fact that ruins hold histories, that ruins are the ground on which histories are contested and remade. Still, the nominative form of a ‘ruin’ does less work than ‘to ruin’ as an ongoing process. Ruins can represent both

Answer 20

something more and less than the sum of the sensibilities of people who live in them.

Instead, we might turn to ruins as epicenters of renewed collective claims, as history in a spirited voice, as sites that animate both despair and new possibilities, bids for entitlement, and unexpected political projects” (2013, 14) & which counter “ruining” process of coloniality of power. C ends in an open-ended fashion, which suggests that the ruin is both an archive (albeit a shifting one) of Capitalist colonial modernity and a source of regeneration (as well as a potential source of pollution). No easy binary answers here… but definitely a quest for balance (as we have seen, the Dreaming, which for
anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose is “both a model for, and a celebration of life, as it is lived in the present”, is fundamentally concerned with balance, in which all relationships and all parts are equal. She also says that “damage to people is damage to country” and that “damage to country, and to Dreamings in particular, causes death or injury to people. Intention is not a
factor”).

Question 21

As Demelza Hall puts it, island =

Answer 21

hybrid zone which refutes any easy categorizations.

Emerges/forms after cyclone which wipes out (settler) Desperance and is both “intrinsic to, and separate from, many of the other spaces explored throughout the narrative” (Hall).

Hall sees it as “representing a union between town & country, indigenous & non-indigenous architectures & infrastructures, & both modern & ancient ways of being” and therefore as “an intensely ambivalent space which fractures dreams of home and nation”. As such it unsettles normative
conceptions of space

Question 22

Strange architecture of this island recalls strange archit of Number One house: entangled mess/mass of rubbish (refuse) & sea life (what sea has discarded) = what constitutes “waste” =

Answer 22

highly subjective (as we have seen in AD’s hyperbolic considerations of dump). What “value” can be found in it is also highly subjective, & “value” not always monetary. This floating island may call up the Robinson Crusoe motif (he, like RC, is marooned on an island from which escape seems impossible), but important to note that Will’s island embodies both land & sea, in keeping w/Indig culture where no separation between the 2. Like AD, he too lives off the waste of Desperance. Like the Ab community “dumped” at dump (C1), Will too is “dumped onto an extraordinary floating island of debris” (p475), but this time it is by the elements.

Question 23

Island in many ways functions as multi-layered heterotopia, oscillating between

Answer 23

giant junk & potentially dangerous platform and an idyllic, almost Edenic space of plenty and bounteous growth, before the pendulum swings back to rot & disintegration of this model at end of chapter.

Question 24

For Hall, island incorporates several of examples of heterotopia given by Foucault:

Answer 24

“heterotopia of deviation” for those whose behaviour is deviant in relation to required norms, spectral presences and ceremony Will performs present island as burial ground (F’s heterotopian cemetery)

& also a heterochronie (time, and how to read or measure it, fluctuates on island, placing it out of time). Finally, it also proves itself to be a transient & also illusory space (see Will’s realization that everything is rotting under & around him). Although floating island allows Will to connect with ancestral heritage, knowledge & skills & also to bear witness to migrants/displaces peoples drifting on sea in search of shelter in an unwelcoming OZ, thereby
making local/national/global connections, fact that it ends up depleting & rotting = Individual on private sanctuary cannot ultimately survive w/out community (“no man is an island” Donne)?

What starts out as promising in between space increasingly colonized by gulls.

Question 25

Capitalo(bs)cene poet(h)ics – the mine

Answer 25

In terms of international, exploitative Capital, highlighted even in Will’s early attempts to sabotage which leave the owners wondering where their plans went wrong.

Also, it is more waste (significantly a Pizza Hut box – multinational companies & toxic waste manufacture) which ironically allows fire to take hold, while spirit of the land protects Indigenous men who have come to rescue Will: they are “thrown down” “in the fold of the ancestral spirit who governed the land”. Destruction of mine seen in just that way by owners and those who work there, but regenerative force of fire also ensures that certain plants, like banksias, will regenerative since they germinate only after their seeds have been burnt in a bushfire & heated to above 400°C.

Question 26

Mine itself is an American-run one (which is ironic comment on forms of economic neocolonialism which are ongoing, in Oz and elsewhere), & name too is ironic: Guffurritt

Answer 26

– suggests “go for it” (neo-liberal slogan if ever there was one – celebration of impetuousness, or opportunitytaking, of not thinking), but we can also hear “guff” which means empty or foolish talk, nonsense (I hear “guff for it”, as a pointer towards the empty rhetoric used to convince Indigenous
Australians (where their opinions have been asked) to give land over to mine industrialists.

As S Barratt points out, “like all other white attempts to modify the landscape, destructive as it is for the environment, the mine is also fragile

Question 27

See too passage pp372-4 (where Will brutalized by mine workers) + continuation of aggressive settler colonial (now transnational + neocolonial) mechanisms of control.

Capitalocene/Capital-obscene writ large upon land & upon Will’s floating island (see p476 top), but also earlier p379 when Will mulls over pollution by mine and porous boundaries (“impenetrable wall” + “barbed-wire crowned cyclone fencing”) which (ostensibly) protect mine (though not for long) while exposing wildlife that flies over and buries under & becomes
contaminated. Will’s worries are directly translated into Capitalocene thinking: “How many evolutions would it take before the natural environment included mines in its inventory of fear?”

Answer 27

Ironic use of “evolution” when clearly a toxic process + see contrast b/tween ugliness of mine water (“chemical-ridden tailings dams”) and the purity of “spring-fed river” (“the water was so clear it was looking like crystal” / “natural waterfalls dropped between ancient towering palms and fig trees”) where idyllic, almost Edenic image of local area undermined by fact that birds “bred a mutation” there. For AW, Capitalocene = Capital-obscene.

See p427 (bottom) where mechanisms of multi-national capitalism function (w/out borders and w/out ethics).

AW’s poetics is ethical here.

Question 28

Indigenous/settler colonial ontologies: transformation & cycles

Answer 28

AW reclaiming & foregrounding ways of being & knowing which are unknown to nonIndigenous readers of novel & which bring to fore non-linear ways of apprehending History, memory & being.

Question 29

Cycle = a recurrence, but no two are identical. AW draws on past (History,
memory, stories, traditions) not so much to recycle as to restore the cycle after epistemic violence of colonization. This is why rubbish dump is such an ambivalent space: what is considered as “waste” is not necessarily abject, dirty or polluted and Linda Ng has made a case for rehabilitating waste against obsolescence and over-consumption of settler OZ culture.

Answer 29

Cf Norm as artist, transforming death into new lease of life thru his taxidermy. This fits w/Indig ontologies where nothing is discarded & where boundaries b/tween death & life = porous. Nod to art as form of preservation (but art, when not oral, also fixes in space & time).

Question 30

Transformation and re-appropriation

Answer 30

Angel Day’s appropriation of the statue of the Virgin Mary and her transformation into an Aboriginal woman (“in the colour of her own likeness”, p. 36) can be seen as a central metaphor of the process of reappropriation at work in Carpentaria.

The Virgin Mary is not just an emblem of the religious violence that was part and parcel of the enterprise of colonization; the notion of virginity bears an interesting relation with the supposedly “virgin land” on which the colonisers “settled”.

Question 31

Repainting the statue as an Aboriginal woman is also

Answer 31

subversive in the sense that it rewrites the past and reclaims a part of history that has been under erasure. Appropriation of Xtian spirituality. Cross-cultural fertilizations

Question 32

Irony and parody: endless twists

Answer 32

The recycling of Western objects and texts almost always involves a critical, parodic and comic distance.

Question 33

It involves displacements and distortions that allow us to recognize the object which is sometimes

Answer 33

transformed almost beyond recognition.

See the play with names: Mozzie (Moses), Desperance (Esperance)… the recycling of Robinson Crusoe

Question 34

the limits of recycling

Answer 34

1. It may be that some things will not be recycled.
2. The cyclone (and the forces of nature) could be getting stronger
3. One may say that this is balanced by a message of hope / Hope at the end of the book, but this ending has a clear utopian dimension.

Question 35

The cyclone (and the forces of nature) could be getting stronger

Answer 35

gathering strength at a much faster pace than the timid pace at which humans are trying to find a response to the consequences of a logic of consumption and waste.

Question 36

One may say that this is balanced by a message of hope / Hope at the end of the book, but this ending has a clear utopian dimension.

Answer 36

Besides, the new start which is imagined requires a form of erasure. Reclaiming another (original) mode of living and being involves getting rid of the rubble and rubbish of colonization

Question 37

It may be that some things will not be recycled.

Answer 37

That humans have produced waste which
they must simply try to hide but which will resurface and could kill them. The “marvellous” island on which Will lands is largely made of plastic. One knows that plastic kills.

Question 38

It may be that some things will not be recycled.

Answer 38

That humans have produced waste which
they must simply try to hide but which will resurface and could kill them. The “marvellous” island on which Will lands is largely made of plastic. One knows that plastic kills.