Abstract

In the final days of 2018, the Jamaican government enacted a ban on single-use plastic bags, Styrofoam, and plastic cups. Over the following months, the black single-use plastic bag – known locally as the “scandal bag”, after the scandals it was so effectively designed and deployed to conceal – disappeared from supermarkets, roadsides, eateries, waterways, and Jamaican life. It also made a slow but remarkable disappearance from the ritual practices of a traditional community deep in a montane tropical rainforest – practices that help to maintain traditional ecological knowledge and centuries of forest culture. This talk explores the role of single-use plastic bags in rural, traditional, agrarian, and forest communities, far outside the capitalist urban- and wastescapes to which they are often discursively confined. Analytically unmoored from the (social, technical, political, corporeal) death of single-use plastic, this talk examines the vitality and sociotechnical life of the plastic bag and the myriad uses and value that are denied by the classification of single use. Finally, this talk considers how a conceptual (for it is not a material) category such as single-use plastic is made and functions, how environmental actors are made dense by racialisation, Othering, and abjection, and how these incredibly dense bodies organise our cosmos.