⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣⁣A Rubbished World: White Supremacy’s Complicated Love Affair with Garbage

Abstract

ABSTRACT In this article I offer a comparative analysis of the relationship between waste and large-scale social crises. Drawing on the history of extremes, the history of Nazi Germany to be precise, I argue that garbage itself functions as a language of crisis that translates seemingly insurmountable social problems into questions of cleanup, upkeep and order. The encroachment of waste often inspires crisis rhetoric, yet it is almost always a symptom of larger, systemic malfunctions such as infrastructural breakdowns, political impasses, social disruptions, natural catastrophe, war or pandemics. In the context of the Nazi race war, an obsession with waste and recycling promised to clean up the mess of war, while hiding the ways in which waste management itself was central to the practices of both war and genocide. My discussion of the Nazi waste regime thus provides a frame for rethinking our own current crisis and its origins in the late 1960s through the prism of the “garbage crisis.”