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Accepted Paper:
All that Breathes: On air, racialised subjections, and ruinous conditions
Uddipta Roy
(University of Maryland, College Park)
In this position piece, I build on insights from the documentary film All That Breathes (2022) to show how how care, air, racialised subjection and breath triangulate in everyday lives of marginalised populations as they inhabit and work upon ruinous conditions of their toxic worlding.
Paper Abstract:
How do our everyday lives—definite to certain local conditions and doings—pan out amidst composite entanglements of air, breath, racialised subjections, violence, and possibilities of lives amidst the politics that is aiming at constant decimation of those very possibilities? In this presentation, I seek to approach this broad question by trying to move through the 2022 HBO Documentary All That Breathes (2022, dir. Shaunak Sen). I attempt to show how care, air, racialised subjection and breath triangulate in everyday lives of two Muslim brothers in the city of Delhi as they inhabit and work upon ruinous conditions of their toxic worlding. They attend to black kites that keep falling from the skies; I read such practices of care as embedded in syncretic traditions and ethical-religious thinking, while their imagination allows them, for the slightest of moments, to move beyond just caring for the other (the birds) into a more attuned relationship with air. Interestingly, their sensing of air is only limited to the idea of an air that lies above, that which is distant, while the everyday sensation of air through breath is still toxic, in terms of its material, environmental, and social conditions.