Making the World Clean Wasted Lives, Wasted Environment, andRacial Capitalism

An antiracist theory of cleaning. Every year, capitalism produces tons of goods that go right to waste. Mining, deforestation, social inequalities, racism, extractivism, and hyper-consumption add to this fantastic amount of waste. How is their disappearance and invisibility organized? Who cleans the world? Upon whose bodies rests bourgeois and white cleanliness? Making the World Clean looks at the masses who daily clean the world to make it livable and comfortable for a few. That comfort rests on the exhaustion of non-white bodies and their exposition to dangerous chemical and premature death. Who cleans the world is thus a political question, with an anti-patriarchal, antiracist, and anti-capitalist frame. To explore this, Francoise Verges looks at the notion of cleanliness of white bodies and the cleanliness of cities in which they live and of the planet they wish to inhabit, stressing the naturalization and invisibilization of cheap labor. Racial capitalism produces waste, waste is