Paper short abstract:

This paper is an exploration of life, labor and suffering around the fringes of Marseille's Étang-de-Berre, among Europe's most profoundly contaminated zones. The paper considers the patterning of Roma informal site selection and refugee resettlement in connection with chemical exposure.

Paper long abstract:

This project looks at the life and experience of racism in the epicenter of one Europe's most toxic zones, a vast and poisoned maritime lagoon. It looks at quiet and destructive chemical modalities of racial harm that are themselves tied up with poverty and property value. The paper in particular considers exposure-as-harm enacted through (1) property prices, and thereby attractiveness for refugee resettlement; and (2) the presence of poisoned land that is thus unclaimed, undesirable, and rendered available for informal migrant Romani occupation. While participatory mapping techniques shed light on proximity to toxic sites correlated with poverty and identity, a second but equally important focus emphasizes narratives of betrayal, exposure, and social (dis)trust as embodied in landscape and choicelessness. The Étang-de-Berre, fringed by the region's refineries and chemical plants, with 40 Seveso Sites, is a disease cluster: cancers at 300% of the national rate, and many babies born armless; it features populations uneasy with and vocal about pollutive capital, but with unequal access to machineries of grievance and protest. Poisons taint the foodways. In this examination of already-precarious groups' experiences and narratives of chemical exposure in this tired and ravaged but storied wasteland, I correlate emotive phenomenologies with bodily and ecological realities of life-and-death consequence. I will have been in the area conducting research, including with NSF funds and as the commissioning co-director of a major international museum project on Roma, for the academic year, and I have been working on/in the region periodically for nearly a decade.