| Sumario: | A garbage collectors' strike is in the center of Tristan Egolf Lord of the Barnyard: Killing the Fatted Calf and Arming the Aware in the Corn Belt. Trash overflows the fictitious town of Baker, Kentucky the novel portrays, alongside a truly extraordinary catalog of numerous kinds of filth. The novel thusly charts processes of deterioration and decay – environmental, as well as social and moral, interconnecting the classification of waste and the categorizations of people, while pointing at the lamentable disposability of both. Drawing on various theoretical approaches to waste, this paper offers an analysis of the interrelated environmental, social and racial layouts it portrays. A harsh critique of American culture, this great American novel protests against consumer culture and its waste production, yet it also traces a linkage between hyper-consumption, waste and the tendency to treat people as filth – based on race, class, species or work place. Lord of the Barnyard is constantly preoccupied with racial tagging and epithets, repeated mapping and categorization of racial layouts – mainly of stigmatypes of "white trash." Carefully unfolding these layouts, the paper further shows how the novel playfully subverts social conceptions in order to uncover endemic injustices and criticize them.
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