A View of the Chemical Valley: Waste and Wasting in Jennilee Austria- Bonifacio's "The Outsiders"

This paper analyses “The Outsiders”, the sixth short story included inCanadian Jennilee Austria-Bonifacio’s 2023 collection Reuniting with Strangers, from theproductive juncture at the intersection of environmental and eco-social justice theories.With special attention to the local-international scale of globalisation processes, and thedefiance brought to light by the attempt at narrating eco-social violence, it is proposedfirst that the so-called Anthropogenic Great Acceleration, which chronologicallyencloses Filipinos’ first massive arrivals at Canada, also provides a context in which toweave a critical dialogue between turbo-capitalist ecological disposability and humandispensability within toxic neoliberal power structures. Secondly, it is argued that,within a general context of dynamic wasting relations, the story articulates a generalrepoliticisation of the current socio-ecological crisis in which a transnational alliancebased on sharing and caring reduces power asymmetries and provokes a collapse of thedualities scaffolding concepts like home and outsider to advocate instead their multiscalarrefiguration.