Spatial Residue: Plastic Affects and Configurations of Place explores how places, whether abandoned malls, haunted swamps, or vintage video games, hold residues of history, feeling, and imagination. Mauve Perle Tahat traces how plastic, as both material and metaphor, shapes our environments and our inner lives, linking the persistence of pollution to the persistence of memory. The book moves across cultural terrains while grounding its analysis in real spaces. Combining autotheory, spatial critique, and cultural analysis, Spatial Residue uncovers how sites of ruin, spectacle, and play reveal deeper truths about survival, resilience, and belonging. It is a book about how we navigate the strange and often dissonant worlds we inherit, and how we might imagine alternative futures from their residues.

Mauve Perle Tahat, PhD, is a scholar of American literature and environmental humanities whose work explores carcerality, cultural memory, and place. They are the author of Ecologies of Incarceration: Carceral Discard Studies in the Anthropocene (Lexington, 2024) and the forthcoming Spatial Residue: Plastic Affects and Configurations of Place (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026).