Paper Short Abstract:

In a class-action lawsuit, Kabwe, Zambia is strategically abjected by lawyers to create visibility of harm in hopes of environmental justice. This paper explores the tensions between the strategy of abjection and the experience of abjection and how toxic narratives shape futures.

Paper Abstract:

In 2020, a class-action lawsuit was filed against Anglo American South Africa to account for decades of lead poisoning in Kabwe, Zambia. Lawyers from London and Johannesburg filed the suit on behalf of Kabwe residents. Increasingly, litigation is used as a strategy to address environmental harm. The plaintiffs' legal team has been set with the task of making sense of the legacy pollution in the courts and the media. Since experiences of legacy pollution and slow violence are often “resistant to dramatic packaging” (Nixon 2011), one way for the lawyers to make sense of the lead poisoning is through the construction of the narrative of Kabwe as “the most toxic town in the world.” I understand the narrativisation of Kabwe by the plaintiffs’ legal team to be a strategic abjection. Abjection is used as a legal strategy to create visibility of harm, in hopes of environmental justice, but how does this strategy also create experiences of marginalisation and injustice? In this paper, I explore how legal professionals strategically abject Kabwe to achieve goals of the lawsuit and the harms incurred when the language of toxicity is applied beyond the site of contamination. For Kabwe residents, the toxic narrative conflicts with and limits their visions of the future. With an increase in environmental litigation, anthropological analysis serves to evaluate the strategies and discourses employed in the legal sphere to consider how climate justice is being pursued and what types of futures and narratives are shaped through the pursuit of justice.