Imagining Air

Air—elemental, invisible, yet weirdly ideological—circulates through this surprising collection, revealing the intermingling of ecologies and built environments, spectral legacies and all-too-present predicaments. The collection insists we cease the habitual “forgetting of air.”

Stacy Alaimo, Author of Exposed: The Politics and Pleasures of Posthuman Times.

Imagining Air is a work of urgent environmental and planetary importance and ought to be read seriously by all who are invested in delivering social, political
and climate equality.

Jack Rondeau
Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism

Information on Contributors

Introduction: Toward a Cultural Axiology of Air TATIANA KONRAD, CHANTELLE MITCHELL, and SAVANNAH SCHAUFLER
DOI: 10.47788/HWDT3673

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
DOI: 10.47788/TCVP5497
2. Dirty Air: Literary Tropes of the Canadian Nation CHRISTIAN RIEGEL
DOI: 10.47788/FRQU2721
3. Witnessing Challenger: Viewing Aerial Space through the Reverberations of Disaster CHANTELLE MITCHELL
DOI: 10.47788/OTME3403

Part II: Air and Art in Times of Crisis
4. Speculative Fiction, Atmotechnic Ecology, and the Afterlife of Romantic Air SIOBHAN CARROLL
DOI: 10.47788/ZJTA2307
5. Respiratory Realism: Elemental Intimacies Between “Carbon Black” and Red Desert JEFF DIAMANTI
DOI: 10.47788/BRTE9492
6. Rumpled Bedsheets and Online Mourning: Social Photography and the COVID-19 Pandemic—Haruka Sakaguchi’s Quarantine Diary and Marvin Heiferman’s Instagram account @whywelook COREY DZENKO
DOI: 10.47788/CLTU3625

Part III: Trans-Sensory Air: Bodies and Environments
7. Envisioning Experiments on Air and the Nonhuman ARTHUR ROSE
DOI: 10.47788/HVZM1065
8. The Importance of Open Air for Health: Environmental and Medical Intersections CLARE HICKMAN
DOI: 10.47788/ERNO3036
9. “The Endless Space of Air”: Helen Keller’s Auratic Worldbuilding JAYNE LEWIS
DOI: 10.47788/HHPU4766
10. Questions of Visibility: Aerial Relations across Society and the Environment, as Revealed by COVID-19 SAVANNAH SCHAUFLER
DOI: 10.47788/WSKQ2452

Index

Tatiana Konrad is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of English and American Studies, University of Vienna, Austria, the principal investigator of “Air and Environmental Health in the (Post-)COVID-19 World,” and the editor of the “Environment, Health, and Well-being” book series at Michigan State University Press. She holds a PhD in American Studies from the University of Marburg, Germany. She was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Chicago (2022), a Visiting Researcher at the Forest History Society (2019), an Ebeling Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society (2018), and a Visiting Scholar at the University of South Alabama (2016). She is the author of Docu-Fictions of War: U.S. Interventionism in Film and Literature (2019), the editor of Plastics, Environment, Culture and the Politics of Waste (2023), Cold War II: Hollywood’s Renewed Obsession with Russia (2020), and Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change: Accelerating Ride to Global Crisis (2020), and a co-editor of Cultures of War in Graphic Novels: Violence, Trauma, and Memory (2018).