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Rosalind Fredericks traces the volatile trash politics in Dakar, Senegal, to examine urban citizenship in the context of urban austerity and democratic politics, showing how labor is a key component of infrastructural systems and how Dakar's residents use infrastructures as a vital tool for forging collective identifies and mobilizing political action

Over the last twenty-five years, garbage infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal, has taken center stage in struggles over government, the value of labor, and the dignity of the working poor. Through strikes and public dumping, Dakar's streets have been periodically inundated with household garbage as the city's trash collectors and ordinary residents protest urban austerity. Often drawing on discourses of Islamic piety, garbage activists have provided a powerful language to critique a neoliberal mode of governing-through-disposability and assert rights to fair labor. In Garbage Citizenship Rosalind Fredericks traces Dakar's volatile trash politics to recalibrate how we understand urban infrastructure by emphasizing its material, social, and affective elements. She shows how labor is a key component of infrastructural systems and how Dakar's residents use infrastructures as a vital tool for forging collective identities and mobilizing political action.

Over the last twenty-five years, garbage infrastructure in Dakar, Senegal, has taken center stage in struggles over government, the value of labor, and the dignity of the working poor. Through strikes and public dumping, Dakar's streets have been periodically inundated with household garbage as the city's trash collectors and ordinary residents protest urban austerity. Often drawing on discourses of Islamic piety, garbage activists have provided a powerful language to critique a neoliberal mode of governing-through-disposability and assert rights to fair labor. In Garbage Citizenship Rosalind Fredericks traces Dakar's volatile trash politics to recalibrate how we understand urban infrastructure by emphasizing its material, social, and affective elements. She shows how labor is a key component of infrastructural systems and how Dakar's residents use infrastructures as a vital tool for forging collective identities and mobilizing political action.

The last twenty-five years in Dakar have seen countless institutional reorganizations in the city's municipal trash collection system, an explosion of informal recycling and disposal practices, frequent and prolonged garbage strikes, and widespread concerted acts of public dumping. Fredericks's article examines the messy politics of trash in Dakar through considering the infrastructure of municipal garbage collection as a critical site of contestation around urban citizenship. The devolution of the central burdens of garbage infrastructure onto labor has meant that municipal trash collectors and the other citizens informally managing garbage in the home, community, and garbage dump are called upon to serve as the backbone of the city's waste collection and disposal architecture. The material relations between infrastructure and labor are probed for what they reveal about practices of government performed through differentially ordering spaces and disciplining residents via the burdens of dirt, microbes, and abjection associated with laboring in filth. Social and bodily technologies are thus revealed to be key elements within a wider gamut of techniques constituting urban infrastructure. At the same time, strikes, dumping, and workers' appeals to the value of cleaning in Islam are shown to subvert ordering paradigms through disrupting the proper flow of waste disposal and inverting its negative associations. The intimacy of this low-tech labor infrastructure and the specificity of waste's material and discursive dimensions provide fertile ground on which to contest the disposability of labor and lay bare the ethics of infrastructure.

ABSTRACTDuring the era of President Abdoulaye Wade, a household waste crisis periodically held the streets of Dakar in its noxious grip. This paper analyses the crisis in light of waste management's role as a fundamental urban public service, key employment sector, and visceral symbol of the city's management. It examines how the institutional landscape of waste management took centre stage in a power struggle within the state that centred on reconfiguring the labour of ordering the city. At the same time, it reveals how the waste-workers' union emerged as one of the most visible and savvy labour movements in contemporary Senegal. Through the creative disorder unleashed by intentional acts of dirtying, workers and residents alike forged new claims to the city. Conclusions are drawn for the wider implications of the disorderly city for the urban question in Dakar and the landscape of citizenship in Senegal's contemporary period.

"Building upon a growing literature that resists the pathologizing effects of developmentalist and comparative framings, this fascinating collection of case studies pushes the frontiers of scholarship on African urbanism through detailed and nuanced ethnographic analyses of life in a diverse set of cities across the continent. These contributions explore a range of innovative institutions, discourses, and material practices through which claims to citizenship are enacted and contested by a diverse array of actors. They treat cities as sites of experimentation, privileging the ordinary, daily, under-the-radar negotiations through which emergent reconfigurations of citizenship are being continually forged. In doing so, they provide a more culturally informed perspective on African politics and society"--