In eleven sharp essays, the contributors to Decay attend to the processes and experiences of symbolic and material decay in a variety of sociopolitical contexts across the globe. They examine decay in its myriad manifestations—biological, physical, organizational, moral, political, personal, and social and in numerous contexts, including colonialism and imperialism, governments and the state, racism, the environment, and infrastructure. The volume's topics are wide in scope, ranging from the discourse of social decay in contemporary Australian settler colonialism and the ways infrastructures both create and experience decay to cultural decay in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan civil war and the relations among individual, institutional, and societal decay in an American high-security prison. By using decay as a problematic and expounding its mechanisms, conditions, and temporalities, the contributors provide nuanced and rigorous means to more fully grapple with the exigencies of the current sociopolitical moment.
Contributors. Cameo Dalley, Peter D. Dwyer, Akhil Gupta, Ghassan Hage, Michael Herzfeld, Elise Klein, Bart Klem, Tamara Kohn, Michael Main, Fabio Mattioli, Debra McDougall, Monica Minnegal, Violeta Schubert
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: States of Decay | Ghassan Hage
- 1. Forever “Falling Apart”: Semiotics and Rhetorics of Decay | Violeta Schubert
- 2. Trash and Treasure: Pathologies of Permanence on the Margins of Our Plastic Age | Debra McDougall
- 3. Infrastructure as Decay and the Decay of Infrastructure | Akhil Gupta
- 4. The Waterfall at the End of the World: Earthquakes, Entropy, and Explanation | Monica Minnegal, Michael Main, and Peter D. Dwyer
- 5. “Vile Corpse”: Urban Decay as Human Beauty and Social Pollution | Michael Herzfeld
- 6. Decay or Fresh Contact? The Morality of Mixture after War’s End | Bart Klem
- 7. Seeds of Decay | Fabio Mattioli
- 8. Discourses of Decay in Settler Colonial Australia | Elise Klein
- 9. Decay as Decline in Social Viability among Ex-Militiamen in Lebanon | Ghassan Hage
- 10. Relational Decay: White Helpers in Australia’s Indigenous Communities | Cameo Dalley
- 11. Decay, Rot, Mold, and Resistance in the US Prison System | Tamara Kohn
- References
- Contributors
- Index
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