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.