This dissertation examines the social history of garbage management in Dakar in the wake of structural adjustment as a lens into the changing landscape of citizenship in this important African democracy. Senegal's capital has been racked with a cycle of garbage crises which periodically hold the city's residents captive to their own waste. Through analyzing the specific conjuncture of circumstances which have produced the trash crises in Dakar, I take them to be not chaotic periods of disintegration, but productive moments where key political, economic, and social factors crystallize and new configurations of social relations are negotiated. Through joining an inquiry into the political economy of garbage management with an exploration of the cultural struggles through which it gains meaning, I engage with debates on the political economy of development, the African state, and the postcolonial urban condition.

Specifically, I examine the labor of garbage management (trashwork) in Dakar beginning with the founding of today's collection system in the well known Set/Setal youth movement. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I trace the social history of trashwork from Set/Setal to the present day trashworkers' union movement to illuminate how certain people get positioned, and position themselves, to do the dirty work, with different rewards and dangers, across the uneven spaces of the city. I focus primarily on the municipal trash collection force, but, in so doing, necessarily contend with the osmosis between "formal" and "informal" trashwork and the key question of household and community-based trash management. The politics of trash collection are shown to be embedded within discourses surrounding state and personal responsibility, cleanliness, and work which turn on key cultural reference points, including Islam, generation, and gender as well as a spatial imaginary of belonging in Dakar. Fleshing these out, this study illuminates how economic change works through and along lines of difference but also how cultural identities may provide the organizing platforms through which to understand and contest economic forces.