Logics of Waste in Liliana Colanzi’s You Glow in the Dark
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.30827/tn.v8i1.28807Keywords:
Waste, Anthropocene, Ecocriticism, Liliana Colanzi, Latin American literatureAbstract
Waste, as anthropologist Myra Hird has put it, is the signifier of the Anthropocene, but it is not a univocal one. It operates simultaneously at symbolic and material levels, and its valences can be positive or negative. Waste is a key concept for thinking through what is at stake in the relationships that human beings foster with the more-than-human world and for considering the material limits on human attempts to dominate the environment. In this sense, literary fiction, with its ability to invigorate the imagination through its creative work with perspective and temporality, is a rich site of reflection on what waste means. A significant example is the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi’s You Glow in the Dark (2024), a short story collection in which waste of many kinds is omnipresent, from residues left behind by all organisms as they live and die to nuclear waste that threatens the physical integrity of those who come into contact with it. In this essay, I think alongside Colanzi’s stories, arguing that their use of waste as a prism through which to consider the passage of time, notions of creation and destruction, and the decentering of human perspective offers valuable lessons on how to live with the waste we create.
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