Imagining Air: Cultural Axiology and the Politics of Invisibility [Paperback]

Imagining Air tackles air as a cultural, medical, and environmental phenomenon. Its major aim is to explore air's visibility and invisibility within the environment through the investigation of such phenomena as pollution and pandemics. The book provides environmental and medical perspectives on air, in particular how it has historically been envisioned in U.S., Canadian and British cultural and literary narratives. The authors explore how these representations and the constructed meanings of air can help us understand the complex nature of air as it pertains to the COVID-19 pandemic, air pollution and broader environmental degradation. Chapter authors: Siobhan Carroll, Jeff Diamanti, Corey Dzenko, Clare Hickman, Tatiana Konrad, Jayne Lewis, Chantelle Mitchell, Christian Riegel, Arthur Rose, Gordon M. Sayre, Savannah Schaufler.This book takes a comprehensive approach to new ways of thinking about air and its ways of relating to the world, through society, place, objects, environments, and technologies. It seeks to represent the broad spectrum of air and the politics of invisibility that reflect the complex and often conflicted nature of lives today.Information on Contributors Introduction: Toward a Cultural Axiology of Air TATIANA KONRAD, CHANTELLE MITCHELL, and SAVANNAH SCHAUFLER Part I: Aerial Politics-Pollution, Consumerism, and Catastrophe 1. Fordism in Detroit, Consumerism in Los Angeles: A Brief History of Automobile Emissions Regulation and Lessons for Greenhouse Gas Pollution GORDON M. SAYRE 2. Dirty Air: Literary Tropes of the Canadian Nation CHRISTIAN RIEGEL 3. Witnessing Challenger: Viewing Aerial Space through the Reverberations of Disaster CHANTELLE MITCHELL Part II: Air and Art in Times of Crisis 4. Speculative Fiction, Atmotechnic Ecology, and the Afterlife of Romantic Air SIOBHAN CARROLL 5. Respiratory Realism: Elemental Intimacies Between Carbon Black and Red Desert JEFF DIAMANTI 6. Rumpled Bedsheets and Online Mourning: Social Photographlƒ5