Humans-as-waste in contemporary dystopic fiction and film

My research is aimed at exploring the role given to humans as a form of waste in contemporary dystopic fiction and film. To understand the obsessive re/production of redundant populations across the world in this age of neo-liberal globalization, I probe into the dark nightmarish world of contemporary dystopian texts by writers such as Rodman Philbrick, Jim Crace, Omar El Akkad, Lidia Yuknavitch, and Fernando A. Flores, among others, whose works offer wide opportunities to study precarities of humankind in relation to disposability, otherness, ethnicity, and marginality. I investigate the political, cultural, and ideological significance of the ‘wasted human’ in the context of the representation of contemporary Western culture, political polarization, and national identity in these narratives. I also aim to cross the boundaries of Western contexts as represented in the narratives and examine their significance in understanding the vulnerabilities of wasted lives on a global scale.

The central question that I approach is in what ways is the representation of waste, wasteland, rag pickers, diseased society, dead bodies, abandoned places, borderlands, bio-engineered people, outlaws, people living on the margins, refugees, minority groups, and so on in the dystopian texts linked with the concept of disposable populations or ‘wasted lives.’

The key objectives of my research are i) to broaden the concept of ‘wasted human’ through the application of cultural and political theories informed by environmental justice and ethical sensibilities, ii) to propose a new ontology of ‘waste’ and ‘life’, that offers a new framework for interpreting cultural texts, and iii) to highlight the unique possibilities of dystopian literature and film in understanding the precarious conditions under which multiple forms of life suffer.