The Elsewhere is Black

Join BCRW for an exciting book salon in celebration of Barnard Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender, Sexuality Studies Marisa Solomon’s The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life with J.T. Roane (Geography, Rutgers) and Mon Mohapatra (Community Justice Exchange), moderated by C. Riley Snorton (English & Comparative Literature and ISSG, Columbia).

In The Elsewhere Is Black, Solomon examines how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism. Tracing the flow of trash and waste across Black spaces, from Brooklyn’s historically Black Bedford-Stuyvesant to the post-plantation towns of Virginia’s Tidewater, Solomon contends that waste infrastructures concentrate environmental risk in an elsewhere that is routinely Black.
She theorizes the relationship between the devaluation of land and Black and more-than-human life to reveal how the risks of poisoning, police violence, dispossession, and poverty hold Black life captive. Highlighting the creativity and resilience that emerge amid these conditions, Solomon, Roane and Monhapatra will invite us to consider collaborative conversations across new eco-political possibilities that center the book’s fundamental ask: What forms of environmentalism arise when Black un/freedom has always been entangled with waste?

Marisa Solomon is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University, where she teaches courses in feminist intersectional science studies, abolitionist ecologies, Black geographies, feminist theory and queer of color critique. Her new book, The Elsewhere is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life (Duke University Press 2025), which received Duke University Press’s Scholar of Color First Book Award, considers ecological politics from the position of criminalized Black dispossession. In so doing, The Elsewhere Is Black examines how waste is a mundane part of poor Black survival and a condition of settler colonial racial capitalism in the U.S. Locating Black survival as a site from which alternative eco-political imaginations spring, she foregrounds how people live and dream amidst waste’s daily accumulation. Solomon opens new ecological horizons to ask: What forms of environmentalism emerge when Black un/freedom has never been distant from waste?

She has written a number of articles on the relationship between waste and Black life including “The Ghetto is a Gold Mine” for the Journal of Labor and Working-Class History and “Ecologies Elsewhere” for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies, and “Living with Harm” forthcoming in Scholar and Feminist Online. Her work also appears in a number of edited volumes, including Waste as Critique (Oxford University Press), Black Environmentalisms (forthcoming with Duke University Press), The Politics of Disposability: Discard Studies in an Era of Devaluation (also forthcoming with Duke) as well as in a compilation of essays for the 2023 Venice Biennial on Everlasting Plastics. She is currently the director of Barnard’s interdisciplinary Race and Ethnic Studies Minor (ICORE/MORE), an editorial board member of Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) and Scholar and Feminist Online and the former co-director of the Black Atlantic Ecologies Working Group at the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, where she was affiliated with the Earth Institute.
Mon Mohapatra (they/she) is a spadeworker and propagandist from India, based in New York City. Mon's work focuses on challenging and interrupting carceral expansion in the US, and beyond, through community and cultural organizing across experiences of gender, migration, and disability. Their writing explores internationalist anti-caste and feminist solidarities, as well as techniques of organizing within and against the scourge of authoritarian violence while resisting reformist and liberal capture.
C. Riley Snorton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and jointly appointed with the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University. As a cultural theorist, his work focuses on racial, sexual, and transgender histories and cultural productions. He is the author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (University of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), winner of the John Boswell Prize from the American Historical Association, the William Sanders Scarborough Prize from the Modern Language Association, the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Nonfiction, the Sylvia Rivera Award in Transgender Studies from the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, and an honorable mention from the American Library Association Stonewall Book Award Committee. Snorton is a co-editor of Saturation: Race, Art and the Circulation of Value (MIT Press/New Museum, 2020). Since 2020, he has been a co-editor of GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies (Duke University Press). Snorton’s next monograph, tentatively titled Mud: Ecologies of Racial Meaning, examines the constitutive presence of swamps to racial practices and formations in the Americas. Currently, he is co-authoring A Black Queer History of the United States (Beacon Press) and co-editing The Flesh of the Matter: A Hortense Spillers Reader (Vanderbilt University Press).
J.T. Roane is author of the award winning book Dark Agoras Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place (NYU 2023). He is assistant professor of Africana Studies and Geography and co-directs the Black Ecologies Lab at Rutgers. Roane serves on the board for an Indigenous and Black led food and environmental justice organization in Virginia's Tidewater, Just Harvest.

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Host or Publisher Barnard Center for Research on Women