Breathing Aesthetics

In Breathing Aesthetics Jean-Thomas Tremblay argues that difficult breathing indexes the uneven distribution of risk in a contemporary era marked by the increasing contamination, weaponization, and monetization of air. Tremblay shows how biopolitical and necropolitical forces tied to the continuation of extractive capitalism, imperialism, and structural racism are embodied and experienced through respiration. They identify responses to the crisis in breathing in aesthetic practices ranging from the film work of Cuban American artist Ana Mendieta to the disability diaries of Bob Flanagan, to the Black queer speculative fiction of Renee Gladman. In readings of these and other minoritarian works of experimental film, endurance performance, ecopoetics, and cinema-vérité, Tremblay contends that articulations of survival now depend on the management and dispersal of respiratory hazards. In so doing, they reveal how an aesthetic attention to breathing generates historically, culturally, and environmentally situated tactics and strategies for living under precarity.

Author: Jean-Thomas Tremblay
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 09/30/2022
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.74lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.52d
ISBN13: 9781478018865
ISBN10: 1478018860
BISAC Categories:
- Literary Criticism | Semiotics & Theory
- Social Science | Gender Studies
- Nature | Environmental Conservation & Protection | General

About the Author
Jean-Thomas Tremblay is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities in the Department of Humanities at York University and coeditor of Avant-Gardes in Crisis: Art and Politics in the Long 1970s.