Erasure, Demolition, and Violent Obsolescence in the Urban Margins

This chapter explores the lived experiences and politics of erasure, demolition, and obsolescence logics in Agbogbloshie. The author highlights how the migrant laborers who make up the majority of workers in Agbogbloshie have faced repeated rounds of eviction and forced displacement. The author shows how e-workers struggle to negotiate state-based forms of violent erasure fueled by demolition and flood control logics that paradoxically redirect and reorient the focus and politics of environmental health in Agbogbloshie. The experience of displacement and eviction in Agbogbloshie exposes intersecting logics of erasure, demolition, and obsolescence. The chapter explores how e-waste workers experience “slow violence” in the form of toxic exposures, bodily distress, and displacement. But Agbogbloshie is not simply a precarious space of destruction or an impossible place to live. As this chapter shows, e-waste workers sustain cultural life amidst dire lived experiences of erasure in Ghana’s urban margins.