Contribution short abstract:

How does an elemental song affect the singer and resonate with her transnational audience? Drawing on Moushumi Bhowmik’s "song of the five elements" and the author's conspiratory ethnography in South Asia, the paper explores the ecopoethics of resistance in a suffocating planet.

Contribution long abstract:

(In collaboration with Moushumi Bhowmik)

Where does a song originate, and where does it travel after being sung, resonating across the dimensions of spacetime? How does an elemental song affect the singer and resonate with her transnational audience on a suffocating planet? This article explores these questions in the company of “a song of the five elements”, by the acclaimed songwriter, singer, and scholar Moushumi Bhowmik. Drawing on South Asian vernacular cosmologies of the five elements (panchabhuta), particularly the often-overlooked fifth element, akash/byom (sky/space), the paper critiques the dominance of Empedoclean four-element framework in Eurocentric cosmology. Through a conspiratory (L. conspirare, breathing together) ethnography of transnational encounters across South Asia and Western Europe, this paper highlights the “ecopoethical affinity” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2021) inherent in such forms of vernacular song-making and elemental thought. By bridging ecological, poetic, and ethical imaginaries of the elements, we explore their capacity to inspire an ecopoethic resistance – redefining the politics of suffocation and imagining new “breathing spaces” for life on a post-pandemic planet.

Keywords: breathing space, conspiratory ethnography, ecopoethics, element, resistance, song, politics of suffocation, vernacular song-making.