Garbocracy

Garbocracy Towards a Great Human Collapse

Sayan Dey

Chennai - Berlin - Bruxelles - Lausanne - New York - Oxford

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.

The German National Library lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2024051547

Cover image: ‘A Plastic Burial’, Sayan Dey.

Cover design by Peter Lang Group AG

ISBN 978-1-80374-729-3 (print)

ISBN 978-1-80374-727-9 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-1-80374-728-6 (ePub)

DOI 10.3726/b22308

© 2025 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne

Published by Peter Lang Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

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About the author

Sayan Dey is a Bengali. He was born and brought up in Kolkata, and he traces his ancestry to different parts of Bangladesh. Currently, he works as an Assistant Professor (Department of English Studies) and Vice-chair (The Committee for Research, Innovations, Consultations, and Training), at Bayan College (affiliated with Purdue University Northwest), Oman. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship with Wits Centre for Diversity Studies, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (2021-2023). He is also an Associate Fellow at the Harriet Tubman Institute, York University, Canada, a Critical Research Studies Faculty at The NYI Institute of Cultural, Cognitive and Linguistic Studies, New York, and an Affiliated Member of the Global Posthuman Network. His latest monographs are Green Academia: Towards Eco-friendly Education Systems (Routledge, 2022) and Performing Memories, Weaving Archives: Creolized Cultures across the Indian Ocean (Anthem Press, 2023). His research interests are posthumanism, decolonial studies, environmental studies, critical race studies, culinary epistemologies, and critical diversity literacy. He can be reached at www.sayandey.com.

About the book

“Tapping into our own shadows, waste becomes a source of self-knowledge for a species at risk of self-annihilation. This book is a must read to raise consciousness in the era of the Anthropocene. Inspiring. Timely. Original.”

– Francesca Ferrando, author of The Art of Being Posthuman

“In this provocative and socially engaged book, garbage becomes a kaleidoscope through which Sayan Dey invites us to view contemporary Indian society. Through the fertile concept of “garbocracy,” the author unveils the embodiment of power and oppression within the organization of space, communities, and knowledge. The book emphasizes the need to liberate ourselves not only from the garbage dumped everywhere but also from the logic that organizes the division between purity and dirt, waste and worth.”

– Marco Armiero, ICREA Research Professor, Autonomous University of Barcelona, author of Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump

The book titled Garbocracy: Towards a Great Human Collapse engages with how the accumulation and disposal of garbage in India is motivated by diverse social, cultural, political, economic, communal, caste, religious and various other factors. The disgusting experiences generated by the sight and the stink of garbage is not only physical in nature, but psychological, neurological, structural, institutional, tangible and intangible in nature. To elaborate further, on the one side the improper disposal of garbage in the public places generate varied health issues and on the other hand it impacts the social, cultural, political, and economic state of individuals and communities. With respect to these perspectives, the aim of this book is to unfold how the various socio-politically motivated patterns and intensions of disposing garbage in India, gradually convert the heaps of garbage into authoritative entities that govern the habitual thinking, behaving and acting patterns of the humans.

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