This talk examines the circulation of waste in the art and culture of marginalised groups that have themselves been disregarded as waste by dominant social forces. Building on queer of colour critique and recent work on environmental racism, it offers a corrective to the dearth of research in discard studies and related fields that would attend to waste’s importance in queer and minoritarian communities. Taking José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of a queer ‘hermeneutics of residue’ as the starting point for my reflections, I turn to the poetry of Amiri Baraka, and the photographic work of Gordon Parks and Alvin Baltrop to advance a minoritarian theory of waste. ‘I make a poetry with what I feel is useful & can be saved out of all the garbage of our lives’, Baraka once said. I read his recuperative poetic practice alongside a number of images by Parks and Baltrop, which focused respectively on the ruins of Harlem and the dilapidated gay cruising grounds of the Hudson Piers, and consider this trio’s (not-unproblematic) efforts to represent Black identity and its associations with waste.

Dr Diarmuid Hester is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English at the University of Cambridge and a College Research Associate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He is the author of WRONG: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper (University of Iowa Press, 2020), the definitive account of one of America’s most acclaimed and controversial writers. His writing has appeared in American Literature, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, the Journal of American Studies, Critical Quarterly, the Los Angeles Review of Books, 3:AM Magazine, gorse, and other venues. He is a Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellow at the Rothermere American Institute in Michaelmas term.