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Waste work and the dialectics of precarity in urban Ghana: durable bodies and disposable things

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 July 2019

Brenda Chalfin
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Abstract

What can the dialectics of waste work tell us about the urban underclass in the flux of late capitalism? What might waste reveal more broadly about the contradictions and uncharted possibilities of material accumulation in urban Africa? Utilizing a relational optic, these issues are explored from the perspective of young men working in the rubbish dumps of Ghana's ‘edge city’ of Ashaiman, a space where the detritus of local and global markets and struggles for urban survival converge. Here, day-to-day entanglements with city dwellers’ discarded items muddy the expected terms of economic dispossession and attainment. At Ashaiman's dump, the perils of social and bodily breakdown are matched by the promise of expanded reproduction via waste work, invigorating the economic prospects of the region's footloose underemployed. Relevant well beyond Ghana, such inversions point to an insistent underside of late-capitalist overproduction: namely, in this dense space of discard and decay, those on the lowest rungs of the urban economic ladder meld bodily expenditure, social aspiration and material breakdown to forge fragile futures and to format urban space. Blending materialisms new and old, a view from Ashaiman's dump bridges the insights of relational ontologies focused on the agency of things and labour-based renderings of capitalism's transformation.

Résumé

Que peuvent nous dire les dialectiques du travail des déchets sur le sous-prolétariat urbain au rythme des mutations du capitalisme tardif ? Que peuvent révéler les déchets plus largement sur les contradictions et les possibilités inconnues de l'accumulation matérielle en Afrique urbaine ? S'appuyant sur une optique relationnelle, l'article explore ces questions du point de vue des jeunes qui travaillent au Ghana dans les décharges de déchets de la pseudopole d'Ashaiman, un espace où convergent les détritus des marchés locaux et mondiaux et les luttes pour la survie urbaine. Les intrications quotidiennes qui s'y jouent avec les articles jetés par les citadins brouillent les termes attendus de dépossession et de réalisation économiques. Dans la décharge d'Ashaiman, les périls de la décomposition sociale et matérielle vont de pair avec la promesse de reproduction élargie par le travail des déchets, revigorant les perspectives économiques des sous-employés sans attaches de la région. Ces inversions, dont la pertinence dépasse les frontières du Ghana, sont révélatrices d'une face cachée insistante de la surproduction du capitalisme tardif : en l'occurrence, dans cet espace dense de rebut et de décomposition, ceux qui sont au bas de l’échelle économique urbaine allient dépense physique, aspiration sociale et décomposition matérielle pour forger des avenirs fragiles et formater l'espace urbain. Alliant anciens et nouveaux matérialismes, une perspective de la décharge d'Ashaiman concilie ce que nous apprennent les ontologies relationnelles portant sur l'agentivité des choses et les interprétations de la transformation du capitalisme basées sur le travail.

Type
Precarity in Ghana and Chad
Information
Africa , Volume 89 , Issue 3 , August 2019 , pp. 499 - 520
Copyright
Copyright © International African Institute 2019 

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