A View of the Chemical Valley: Waste and Wasting in Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio’s “The Outsiders”

Abstract

This paper analyses “The Outsiders”, the sixth short story included in Canadian Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio’s 2023 collection Reuniting with Strangers, from the productive juncture at the intersection of environmental and eco-social justice theories. With special attention to the local-international scale of globalisation processes, and the defiance brought to light by the attempt at narrating eco-social violence, it is proposed first that the so-called Anthropogenic Great Acceleration, which chronologically couches Filipinos’ first massive arrivals at Canada, also provides a context in which to weave a critical dialogue between turbo-capitalist ecological disposability and human dispensability within toxic neoliberal power structures. It is argued in second place that, within a general context of dynamic wasting relations, the story articulates a general repoliticisation of the current socio-ecological crisis in which a transnational alliance based on sharing and caring reduces power asymmetries and provokes a collapse of the dualities scaffolding concepts like home and outsider to advocate instead their multiscalar refiguration.