Re-Enchantment with the Waste of the World: Expressing Futures and Representing Wastelands in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide
As a result of environmental advocacy of the previous decades, the harms caused by e-waste conjure up images of hellish wastelands. The images had provided fertile ground for cli-fi writer Chen Qiufan’s novel Waste Tide (2019) to reimagine what it might be like to live among humongous piles of electronic waste. The author elaborates this vision based on the experiences of a short visit to Guiyu, China’s most notorious e-waste processing site. He explores what will happen if humanity’s day-to-day reliance on electronic devices is to increase and lead to electronic prosthetics implanted in bodies, making electronics almost into biological waste but without the possibility of breaking down in nature. The present article explores how facts and fiction bleed into each other. Rather than exploring how Chen’s narrative builds on real life, it sets about to peel back the layers of imagination that make up the e-waste problem. The article turns the gaze to environmental advocacy reports as generative spaces of science fiction imagination, which had been instrumental at imbuing e-waste with a dark charisma. E-waste stories become useful sites to examine how narratives of climate breakdown, conceived to provoke action, provide a case for a dark re-enchantment with the world. This is only a problem inasmuch as the same narratives that work well in mobilising people may become the foundation for ill-fitting laws. Reflecting on my ethnographic fieldwork in Delhi, another well-publicised informal e-waste processing site, this article raises the questions: to what extent has the threat of e-waste’s toxic harm been conceived of in futuristic imaginations? And how do texts and narratives colour and prefigure academics’ and practitioners’ experience of the world?