This volume reopens 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 of the African South.
While studies of both land and water have recently worked increasingly at the intersection of environmental humanities and postcolonial and decolonial studies, this has been less the case with air and atmospheres, and the latter have been only sporadically developed as material and political subjects of research in the majority world and the hemispheric 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.
