Dumping Fate: Toxic Waste and its Maritime Aftermath with Professors Jatin Dua and Naor Ben-Yehoyada

Join us for "Dumping Fate: Toxic Waste and its Maritime Aftermath" with Professors Jatin Dua, University of Michigan and Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Columbia University. This public talk is part of a 2023-2024 Andrew Mellon Sawyer Seminar titled “Evasion: Thinking the Underside of Surveillance.”

About the talk:

In the middle of the Cold War, various state officials, politicians, middlemen, and mafiosi operated in transporting US and Italian-based transnational toxic (chemical & radioactive) waste to Somalia, Burkina Faso, Venezuela, and Haiti during the 1980s. The circuit stood at the center of several Italian Parliamentary investigative commissions (with self-described inconclusive reports in 1995, in 2001,and in 2018) and numerous journalistic and judicial investigations.

We focus on the structure, dynamics, and ramifications of the Italian-Somali branch of this circuit. What forms of transnational political relations mobilized to facilitate the transit and depositing of toxic waste, and how did these circuit reshape those relations? What traces did such toxic material leave en route? What damaging effects did it have on humans and non-humans both in places of transit and where it was deposited? How did erstwhile and ongoing colonial and imperial relations shape locations, actions, and transactions along the route? What political imaginaries of shared fate, reparation, responsibility, and evidence motivate the aftermath of this dumping of fateful waste?