Appendix

“Inhale/Exhale” Suggested Reading

The injunction “Inhale/Exhale” is a frequent refrain in American yoga classes and, from this tradition, often appears in the overlapping genres known as “self-help” and “mindfulness” that have been popular with Western audiences since at least the 1990s. Search “breath” and much of what comes up will fall into this category. A critical stance to these genres and the often false or incomplete promises they offer is necessary. At the same time, yoga, breathing exercises, and other aspects of “mindfulness” have been a lifeline for many of us, and their benefits are not insubstantial. This bibliography takes this into account, while also acknowledging that breath is not an evenly distributed privilege. “I can’t breathe,” the final words uttered by Eric Garner, George Floyd, and so many other victims of state-sponsored violence, have become a metaphor for the condition of Black life in America. Understanding the role of breath in racism is a major goal of this issue. The violent suffocating tactics used by police officers are only one of the ways that breath is stolen from Black Americans, however - scholarship on environmental racism shows that air quality in Black and poor neighborhoods around the world is often much lower. There is much that the atmospheric humanities can contribute to how we understand the passage of oxygen between the lungs and the “outside.” This bibliography offers an incomplete list of resources that have helped us to make these connections. 

“Breathe in… breathe out”: Perspectives on Breath and Mindfulness

Ali, Kazim. “Yoga and the Cessation of the Self.” In Resident Alien: On Border-crossing and the Undocumented Divine, 93–104. University of Michigan Press, 2015. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.8252696.13.

Goldberg, Michelle. The Goddess Pose: The Audacious Life of Indra Devi, the Woman Who Helped Bring Yoga to the West. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Mallinson, James, and Mark Singleton, eds. Roots of Yoga. Penguin Classics. [London] UK: Penguin Books, 2017.

Nestor, James. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020.

Tremblay, Jean-Thomas. “Breath: Image and Sound, an Introduction,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 16, no. 2, 2018. 

Van der Kolk, Bessel A. The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2015.

“I can’t breathe”: Oxygen and Inequality

Allen, Irma Kinga. “Thinking with a Feminist Political Ecology of Air-and-Breathing-Bodies.” Body & Society 26, no. 2 (June 2020): 79–105. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X19900526.

Apata, Gabriel O. “‘I Can’t Breathe’: The Suffocating Nature of Racism.” Theory, Culture & Society 37, no. 7–8 (December 2020): 241–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276420957718.

Bowman, Brett. “On the Biopolitics of Breathing: Race, Protests, and State Violence under the Global Threat of COVID-19,” South African Journal of Psychology 50, no. 3: 312-315.

Braun, Lundy. Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics. Reprint edition. Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2021.

Douglas, Kelly Brown. Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2015.

Gardiner, Beth. Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2019.

Jones, Shermaine. “‘I CAN’T BREATHE!’: Affective Asphyxia in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.” South: A Scholarly Journal 50, no. 1 (2017): 37–46.

Kendall, Mikki. Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot. New York, New York: Penguin Books, 2021.

Kenner, Alison. Breathtaking: Asthma Care in a Time of Climate Change. 1st edition. Minneapolis ; London: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2018. 

Mbembe, Achille. “The Universal Right to Breathe,” translated by Carolyn Shread, Critical Inquiry 47, no. S2.

Medina, Tony. Committed to Breathing. Chicago: Third World Press Foundation, 2003.

Meissner, Caits and PEN America. Breathe into the Ground: PEN America 2020 Prison Writing Awards Anthology., 2021.

Reed, Anthony. “Body/Language.” In Soundworks, 143–80. Race, Sound, and Poetry in Production. Duke University Press, 2021. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv19wx7n2.8.

Tremblay, Jean-Thomas. “Feminist Breathing,” differences 30, no. 3 (2019).

Washington, Harriet A. A Terrible Thing to Waste: Environmental Racism and Its Assault on the American Mind, 2020.

A History of Breathing

Bersani, Leo. Receptive Bodies. Chicago ; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2018.

Elswit, Kate. “Reflections on Bodies in Lockdown: The Coronasphere.” Multimodality & Society 1, no. 1 (March 2021): 69–74. https://doi.org/10.1177/2634979521992277.

Green, Adam. “Oh, Excellent Air Bag” under the Influence of Nitrous Oxide, 1799-1920. Cambridge: PDR Press, 2016.

Ingold, Tim. “On Breath and Breathing: A Concluding Comment.” Body & Society 26, no. 2 (June 1, 2020): 158–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X20916001.

Macnaughton, Jane. “Making Breath Visible: Reflections on Relations between Bodies, Breath and World in the Critical Medical Humanities.” Body & Society 26, no. 2 (June 1, 2020): 30–54. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X20902526.

Williams, Edgar. Breathing: An Inspired History. Reaktion Books, 2021.

Breathing Beyond the Human

Frost, Samantha. “Oxygen.” In Biocultural Creatures: Toward a New Theory of the Human, 101–18. Duke University Press, 2016. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv11319pb.8.

Irigaray, Luce, and Michael Marder. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. Critical Life Studies. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.

Keller, Catherine. “‘I Can’t Breathe’: The Whole Earth Echoes the Cry for Justice.” ABC Religion & Ethics (blog), June 8, 2020. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/catherine-keller-i-cant-breathe-the-cry-for-justice/1233295.

Kohn, Eduardo. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.

Oxley, Rebecca, and Andrew Russell. “Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Breath, Body and World.” Body & Society 26, no. 2 (June 2020): 3–29. https://doi.org/10.1177/1357034X20913103.

Aesthetics of Breathing

Crawley, Ashon T. Blackpentecostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility. New York: American Literatures Initiative, 2016.

Engelmann, Sasha. “Towards a Poetics of Air: Sequencing and Surfacing Breath,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 40, no. 3 (2015): 430-444.

Fuller, David, Corinne Saunders, and Jane Macnaughton, eds. The Life of Breath in Literature, Culture and Medicine: Classical to Contemporary. Palgrave Studies in Literature, Science, and Medicine. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021.

Gatt, Caroline. “Breathing beyond Embodiment: Exploring Emergence, Grieving and Song in Laboratory Theatre.” Body & Society 26, no. 2 (June 2020): 106–29. 

Ingold, Tim. Lines: A Brief History. London: Routledge, 2016. 

Kim, Myung Mi, and Cristanne Miller. Poetics and Precarity. Buffalo, NY: SUNY Press, 2018. 

Kobak, Liz. POETRY in the TIME of CORONAVIRUS: The Anthology. Edited by G. A. Cuddy. Independently published, 2020.

Labuhn, Beata.  "Breathing a Moldy Air: Olfactory Experience, Aesthetics, and Ethics in the Writing of Ruskin and Riegl." Future Anterior 13, no. 2 (2016): 103-17.

Quinn, Alice, ed. Together in a Sudden Strangeness: America’s Poets Respond to the Pandemic. New York: Knopf, 2020.

Rose, Arthur, Stephanie Heine, Naya Tsentourou, Corinne Saunders, and Peter Garratt. Reading Breath in Literature. New York, NY: Springer, 2018.

Umewaka, Naohiko. "Noh Theatre, The Aesthetics of Breathing." In Respiration and Emotion, 173-75. Tokyo: Springer Japan.