The Elsewhere Is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life

by Marisa Solomon

In The Elsewhere Is Black, Marisa 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. Solomon emphasizes that ecological violence is a form of racialized heteropatriarchal environmental control that upholds whiteness as a propertied way of life and criminalizes Black survival. As she points to acute sites of toxicity, Solomon 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. 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 What forms of environmentalism emerge when Black un/freedom has never been distant from waste?

Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award

Genres: Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

Published September 30, 2025

Reviews

[vernon · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have complicated feelings about The Elsewhere Is Black. On one hand, Dr. Solomon's a great writer, this is a very interesting ethnography, and the more research-focused elements of it were highly informative. On the other, there are moments where it feels like Solomon is kind of twisting the words of those that she speaks to, like Sal and Betty. It feels like she's using them to prove a point that she already wanted to make, even if that wasn't what they were saying (for ex., when Betty tries to relate to Dr. Solomon and her not needing a man and Dr. Solomon assumes that this is Betty talking about being queer, when Betty never said anything about being queer, just about being independent).

[Quinn Monette · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good bit of geography/theory. The empirical/materialist aspects were the most compelling to me. Tarries w/ an anarchist critique of property, which I find less convincing than the Marxist position