A night of vital, comprehensive conversation: The BCRW’s ‘The Elsewhere is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life’ book salon

On Wednesday, February 4, The Barnard Center for Research on Women hosted a sold-out book salon for Barnard Professor Marissa Solomon’s new book, ‘The Elsewhere is Black,’ creating a space for enriching, multi-lensed conversation.

Photo provided by Ale Pedraza Buenahora

By Sasha Zimet

February 11, 2025

In the midst of a winter's night on February 4, the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) hosted a book salon at Recirculation, a bookstore in Washington Heights, celebrating the release of “The Elsewhere is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life,” a new book by Marissa Solomon, Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Barnard. The book salon was a celebration of the book’s release and a collaborative dialogue about the intersection between environmental justice and ecological violence, as well as waste infrastructures and architectures, highlighting how they play a role as both mundane aspects of Black survival and products of colonial racial capitalism. 

Professor Rebecca Jordan-Young and Professor Margot Kolter, two Barnard faculty members and the leading organizers of the event, spoke about the purpose behind hosting the salon. Jordan-Young expressed the desire to showcase Professor Solomon’s exceptional work, as well as hoping to stimulate a collective conversation as a result of the gathering. 

Jordan-Young introduced Solomon to the book salon’s stage. After a roaring applause, Solomon approached the stage to give a profoundly illustrative and important introduction to her book. “The Elsewhere is Black” traces the flow of trash across Black “elsewheres,” exposing how waste infrastructures and environmental dangers are intrinsically tied to racism, capitalism, and colonialism. Solomon relates these themes to examine how police violence, poverty, and dispossession hold Black lives captive. 

Jordan-Young expressed Professor Solomon’s genius ability to both accurately and poetically document ecological politics of criminalized, Black dispossession: “It’s hard to believe how writing about trash can be so insistently poetic,” said Jordan-Young. 

In researching for her book, Solomon traversed the stream of trash across Black spaces from Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to post-plantation towns in Tidewater, Virginia. Through this geographically expansive research, Solomon spent time with a diverse group of people, ranging from sex workers in Virginia Beach to a junk-shop owner from Bed-Stuy and his team of scavengers. This allowed her to give texture to these spaces by portraying the people she spent time with in the way they wanted to be represented. In an interview conducted with Nico Wright (BC ’25), published by BCRW, Solomon further expanded upon the power and intention behind these descriptions: “I wrote the book the way I wrote it for many reasons, including because I felt like I owed it to my interlocutors. I had (and have) many misgivings about writing a book where I am adding another “case” study to the litany of violences done to Black people,” said Solomon. “I wrote the book, especially for the girls, because they wanted to be represented and seen; and I wrote inspired by what they taught me and guided by the promise that I would do everything I could to honor how they wanted to be represented.” 

Solomon spoke about how the tunes of Afrofurism inspired her descriptions, giving a sharply poetic and robustly rhythmic flair to her writing. In her interview with Wright, Solomon further talked about this nature of her writing: “I recognized that in writing I was gonna have to lean into the way people reuse or recycle phrases, re-mix genres, as a strategy for surviving the ocular violence that anti-Blackness already perfects,” said Solomon. “Instead of drawing on the descriptions that outlets like the New York Times might use, I turned to other genres of Black cultural production, from hip hop to art to jazz, to the environmental sculpture on the cover of the book.” 

Cultural theorist and author Professor C. Riley Snorton, spadeworker and propagandist Mon M., and author Professor J.T. Roane also spoke at the book salon. Each speaker contributed an engaging perspective to the dynamic discussion. Jordan-Young shared that behind each speaker invited was new expertise and insight into “The Elsewhere is Black”: “C. Riley Snorton brings essential queer and trans theoretical expertise that speaks directly to Solomon’s engagement with property, embodiment, and dispossession.” She also expressed how Mon M.’s activist work regarding carceral violence intertwines with Solomon’s dedication to documenting the stories of both organizers and those afflicted by racial capitalism, and how J.T. Roane’s study of environmental justice and Black geographies served as pillars for Solomon’s research. 

This event was a successful weaving of activist, academic, and diverse thought — an intersection that is integral to the BCRW’s work. “The idea of the ‘Scholar and Feminist’ is not just the name of our annual conference and peer-reviewed journal, but a guiding principle of our work, which is to produce rigorous research for social change and make that work accessible beyond the university,” expressed Jordan-Young. “That combination is also central to Professor Solomon’s book.” Thus, the book-salon consisted of an amalgam of attendees, ranging from academics, students, activists, and even book-lovers, allowing for rich, multi-lensed conversation. The mosaic of audience members varied in expertise and knowledge about the topic, allowing the salon to serve as a workshop for growth, discussion, and revelation. 

A key aspect of the event was the fact that it was open to the public. Jordan-Young noted that because these issues are so embedded in the real and lived experiences of New Yorkers, it was integral to the BCRW’s mission to host the book salon outside of a strictly academic, privatized space: “We hope attendees leave with a deeper understanding of how environmental harm is structured by race, gender, and geography but also with a renewed sense of the creativity and political imagination that emerge from communities navigating those harms every day. Above all, we hope the event invites people to think differently about who environmentalism centers, whose knowledge it values, and what kinds of futures it opens up.” 

One of the most spell-binding moments of the event was the question that closed it. An art school graduate, who described themselves as extrinsic from the academic sphere, asked the poignant question of what we can actively do within our community. “We need to not turn away,” Solomon responded. Solomon re-iterated that so much of her book was representing people the way in which they wanted to be represented, inviting readers to realize that the characters in the book are not merely characters, but the same people we pass by every day on the street. Solomon pointed out that even though our architecture is designed to compulse us to look away, one of the most pivotal things we can do is to defy this structure and immerse ourselves in the fight for an abolition of incarceration, property, and racial capitalism. 

The politically and educationally fierce discussion shared at “The Elsewhere is Black” book salon provided space for an enlightening expansion of knowledge, beyond what I was able to express in this article. By the end of the event, everyone was lining up to either get their copy of “The Elsewhere is Black” signed, or to purchase a brand new copy for themselves. The book salon cultivated expansive discussion and thought, but was only the beginning of the conversation produced by Solomon’s brilliant new book.