Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (review)

Abstract

T environment is an incoherent imaginary. Highly racialized in its moralistic deployment of good and bad (McKee 2015), clean and dirty (Butt 2020, Resnick 2021), worth preserving or wasted (West 2006, Wolfe 2006), its terms produce colonial schemas and maps that demarcate who is and isn’t deserving of global aid. Improbably suggesting shared culpability for the asymmetric effects of late capitalism’s ongoing destruction (Fortun 2001), colonial environmental imaginaries create geographies of charity in the wake of producing what Katherine McKittrick (2013) and others have called uninhabitable geographies. Yet, the incoherence of “the environment” is a resource for racial capitalism, particularly when settler colonial markers of progress require that some people, land, and communities remain stuck in the past in order to facilitate the “modern” march forward (Solomon 2019). Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s Waste Siege: The Life of Infrastructure in Palestine works within the incoherence of environmental imaginaries, revealing how their dissonance produces meaning, time, and place in Palestine. Subtended by the toxic materialities of what Rob Nixon (2011) has called environmental slow violence, Stamatopoulou-Robbins’s ethnography of infrastructure offers a different analytic to describe the siege on Palestinian lives: a waste siege. This ethnography asks the reader to see the “disorienting patchwork of military installations” (19) as well as unpredictable yet inevitable encounters with the state (i.e., Israel) and something “state-like” (i.e., the Palestinian Authority) as critical to how waste moves in and through Palestine. From Palestinian domestic waste practices and experiences with disposable