“The waste of the empire”: Neocolonialism and environmental justice in Merlinda Bobis’s “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer”

Abstract

[Abstract] This article interrogates the politics of “waste” in both the environmental and the socio-economic senses of the word, with a special attention to the outsourcing of toxicity and the “wastification” of disposable, residual bodies. Both toxic discourse, as explored by Lawrence Buell and Cynthia Deitering, and environmental justice, in particular Rob Nixon’s elucidation of the representational challenges posed by slow violence, contribute to a specific approach, Waste Theory, used here to analyse “The Long Siesta as a Language Primer”, a 1999 short story by Filipino/Australian writer Merlinda Bobis, in which she grapples with the dirty politics of waste. This narrative constitutes a neocolonial allegory particularly amenable to Waste Theory, in that it allows critics to tease out the ways in which toxic environments act in conjunction and collusion with the toxic configurations of power that transform human beings into literal or figurative waste.