My article draws on cultural production from South Africa, Brazil and India to test theorisations that read subjects and objects as ontologically comparable. Using the oceanic circulation of human waste products to link the above locales, I show how the use of junk by the urban poor shows evidence of a relationship with discarded objects that contests their nationa...

This article reads representations of street movement in Peter Abrahams's novel Mine Boy (1946) in order to think through the novel's ideological tensions and their relation to urban space in pre-apartheid Johannesburg. I argue that modalities of movement in the fiction – walking, running, dancing – disclose the organisation of urban life by racist capitalism. Simu...