Dirty Work: An Ecocritical Reflection on Human Feces as a Tool of Protest and Performance

Abstract

On March 9, 2015, Chumani Maxwele, a University of Cape Town political science student, hurled the contents of a portable toilet at a statue of British mining magnate and white supremacist Cecil Rhodes. At nearly a decade’s remove, Maxwele’s controversial act reverberates. Though often portrayed as the rash gesture of a dispossessed Black youth, the event was a meticulously stage-managed piece of ecocriticism. Yet his catalytic act is virtually absent from academic discussions of the #RhodesMustFall movement. The erasure of Maxwele’s radical protest raises important questions about who can create ecocriticism, who can perform, and what it means when a Black activist uses human excrement and disgust as the medium for protest.