Review of Garbocracy: Towards a Great Human Collapse, by Sayan Dey

Sayan Dey's Garbocracy (2025) serves up an incisive and original lens on the environmental humanities, using waste as the pivot of Indian politics and subjectivity.He launches with a powerful premise: "garbocracy" is not just about trash heaps but about how "the accumulation, disposal, distribution, and regulation of waste become central features of the social, political, and cultural fabric of contemporary India" (2025, 3).At the same time, Dey's intervention extends a Global South-oriented waste-studies agenda that tracks how disposal regimes organize social life and governance (Bell 2019, 99).His framing also resonates with postcolonial environmental humanities that read ecological crisis through histories of empire, extraction, and uneven development, foregrounding how toxicity and disposability travel along colonial routes (DeLoughrey, Didur, and Carrigan 2015, 42).In mapping "garbocracy" onto urban spatial orders, the book speaks to work on geographies of dirt and contamination that render cleanliness/ filth as techniques of ordering people and places (Campkin and Cox 2007, 57).The reader is immediately reminded of Antonio Gramsci's foundational insight-power is not just enforced, but normalized and accepted as "common sense" through the workings of hegemony (Gramsci 1971, 12).Thus, if Dey claims garbocracy rules both streets and minds, a Gramscian perspective clarifies that this is because the logic of waste is made hegemonic-naturalized as the order of things.Dey's ethnographic vignettes from Kolkata and Varanasi dramatize how the politics of garbage is inseparable from the politics of space and identity.He observes that municipal authorities often "dump refuse in poor, Muslim, or refugee neighbourhoods," a "disgusting performance" that naturalizes exclusion (Dey 2025, 17).From a Gramscian perspective, such practices illustrate the "manufacture of consent"-the normalization of spatial injustice via everyday habits, media, and institutions (Gramsci 1971, 44).Environmental-justice scholarship names this pattern environmental racism, documenting how waste infrastructures and toxic exposures are disproportionately imposed on marginalized communities (Bullard 1990, 27;Alvarez, Schultz, and Martiniello 2022, 2064-2078).Framed as a question of spatial justice, these routinized siting decisions and service withdrawals actively produce uneven urban geographies (Soja 2010, 26).At transnational scales, movements of waste map onto hierarchies of power and disposability (Pellow 2007, 12), while the diffuse, attritional harms of toxicity exemplify forms of "slow violence" that obscure accountability and make consent to unequal exposure appear thinkable (Nixon 2011, 21).In this sense, the issue is not only about who disposes of waste, but about how society comes to accept where and why waste is placed.As Dey unpacks the concept of "garbo-imperialism"-waste as "an imperial entity by dictating and regulating our habitual existential patterns physically and cognitively" (Dey 2025, 34) -Gramsci's framework clarifies that such regulation functions not only as top-down domination but also as a