Toxic Afterlive of E-Waste and the Politics of "Slow to Hope"

Environmental NGOs and international media often portray e-waste as toxic pollutants prone to North-to-South dumping. Yet, local communities participating in the e-waste economy frequently see it as a valuable resource, despite being aware of its toxicity. Such friction invites us to witness competing worldings of environmental justice, where normative narratives of global inequality, vulnerability, and fast hope need to be revised through situated human-waste sociality in local lived ecologies. Through an analysis of e-waste toxicology in China, I explore the politics of “slow to hope,” where intoxicated people experience hope and agency in delayed and contextual ways, just as the slow violence imposed upon them has been multiscalar and accumulative. To come to terms with the biochemical regimes of industrial modernity that trash and transmute racialized and working-class bodies, I reflect on the potential and limits of “toxic kinship” as a framework to restructure ethics and politics, and illustrate through a Chinese sci-fi narrative that centers the ambivalent, unruly, and haunting afterlives of waste for (dis)engaging slow modes of hope in toxic lifeworlds.