Abstract

This essay opens up a new perspective on migration through the lens of waste, tracing the effects of war, border securitization, and global capitalism on a local scale. The analysis of Afganistanbul (2018), a short documentary produced by a team at Kadir Has University in Istanbul where the book in hand originated, captures the predicament of undocumented waste workers in the city who lack the means to continue their journey to Europe or return to their homeland, while resources and revenue in the global recycling business circulate freely. Following the film in its close-up on a specific site of life and labour, this essay teases out competing aspirations among local and migrant city dwellers, arguing that representations of migrant experiences are prone to the temptation of poverty porn and calling on spectators to consider their own implication in interlocking systems of inequity.

Keywords: undocumented migrants, waste, recycling, documentary, Istanbul

“Here we have a man whose job it is to gather the day's refuse in the capital. Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collects the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste. He sorts things out and selects judiciously; he collects, like a miser guarding a treasure, refuse which will assume the shape of useful or gratifying objects between the jaws of the goddess of Industry.” This description is one extended metaphor for the poetic method, as Baudelaire practiced it. Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse, and both go about their solitary business while other citizens are sleeping; they even move in the same way. ‒ Walter Benjamin, “The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire” (2006, p. 108)