Trash and Limits in Latin American Culture

The ecological, social, and aesthetic
functions of garbage in literature and film from Argentina to Mexico

This book looks at
the role of waste in Latin American cultural texts from the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries and makes the case for foregrounding trash as an object
of analysis in literary and cultural studies in Spanish America and Brazil. By
considering how writers and filmmakers engage with the theme, Micah McKay argues
that garbage illuminates key limits related to the region’s experience with contemporary
capitalism.

Recognizing
trash as an important social reality, McKay traces its appearance in a diverse range
of products: novels and documentary films with dumps as settings, short stories
whose main characters are garbage pickers, and works that portray writing as a
process of piecing together found materials. McKay argues that waste and the
problems it poses are key to understanding marginalization, political struggle,
and the production of aesthetic value.

Drawing
on insights from material ecocriticism, discard studies, and biopolitics, McKay
theorizes that trash opens a space of reflection on what it means to be human,
the possibilities for building community amid catastrophe, gendered notions of
labor and care, and the pitfalls of neoliberal environmentalism. McKay shows how trash
in literature and film helps readers and viewers contemplate the limits of how
we inhabit the planet.

Publication of this work made possible by a
Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the
National Endowment for the Humanities.