Postcolonial Air and Atmospheres: Elemental life and environmental crisis
About this ebook
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.
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About the author
Sarah Nuttall is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at WISER at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She was Director of WISER from 2013-2023. She is author, editor or co-editor of more than 15 books, including Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis (Duke UP/Wits UP), which will be published in a new edition in 2026, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-Apartheid (Wits UP) and Your History with Me: The Films of Penny Siopis (Duke UP). Her collaborative work in the environmental humanities has resulted, amongst others, in the widely read Reading for Water: Materiality and Method (Routledge, 2023).
Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand and was Global Distinguished Professor at New York University from 2013 to 2022. From 2018 to 2023, she co-directed a project Oceanic Humanities for the Global South with partners from Mozambique, India, Jamaica and Barbados. Recent publications include Dockside Reading: Hydrocoloniaism and the Custom House (2022) and two co-edited volumes, Reading for Water: Materiality and Method (2023) and Publishing from the South: A Centenary of Wits University Press (2024).
