Postcolonial Air and Atmospheres: Elemental Life and Environmental Crisis

This volume puts two traditions of scholarship into conversation: Euro-American work on air and atmospheres, and emergent postcolonial debates on these themes. Drawing on the strengths of the first, this collection probes its limits, while mapping an emergent field of postcolonial research on air and atmospheres.Postcolonial Air and Atmospheres recontextualizes debates on atmospheres and aesthetics, exploring these themes in relation to the uneven hemispheric terrains of material decay and toxicity. It extends the narrow spatial purview of the Euro-American scholarship by taking an empire-wide perspective, considering historical questions of air and enslavement alongside South Asian histories of air-conditioning and the toxic atmospheres of extractive industries. It develops a phenomenology of breathing in a range of postcolonial settings to revisit the theorizations of air and breath in western critical theoretical scholarship. The collection comprises three sections. 'Affective Atmospheres' explores the materialities of air while foregrounding atmospheres as sites of affect, politics and power in the postcolony. 'Unfree and Impure Airs' foregrounds clean and toxic air, who breathes them along with the politics and technologies of how these unequal forms of air were and are produced. 'Breathing in' centres practices of breath as a means to analyse air and atmospheres.