New book announcement | Postcolonial Air and Atmospheres: Elemental Life and Environmental Crisis edited by Sarah Nuttall and Isabel Hofmeyr
New book announcement
Postcolonial Air and Atmospheres: Elemental Life and Environmental Crisis
edited by Sarah Nuttall and Isabel Hofmeyr is published this week with UCL Press.
The book is fully Open Access and can be accessed at this link: https://uclpress.co.uk/book/
The volume re-opens and revitalises debates on the materialities of air and atmospheres, including practices of breathing, in a multitude of postcolonial and Southern hemispheric contexts. It probes the limits, and extends the narrow spatial purview, of much of the emerging scholarship, considering historical questions of air and enslavement alongside South Asian histories of air-conditioning and the drifting toxic atmospheres of water bodies in the African South.
Affective atmospheres born of dust, damp, wind and sound; unfree and impure airs shaped by histories of inequality; and modes and manners of breathing, whether asthmatically, interoceptively, laboriously or as a means of creating an artwork, all reinvigorate our understanding of aerial elemental media. Throughout, the book explores ways to recalibrate forms of air, atmospheres and breathing for a more productively entangled, relational, regenerative and just world.
The case studies and more than fifty colour images make the book compelling for teaching and new research.
The volume emerged from a collaboration between WISER at Wits University and the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at University College London. It began as a co-hosted series called ‘Breathing In: Air and Atmospheres’, on the WISER online platform.
