It is not an accident that two of the most thought-provoking recent books on the subject-Joseph Amato’s 2000 Dust: A History of the Small & the Invisible and Carolyn Steedman’s 2001 Dust: The Archive and Cultural History-dwell on the ways that this stuff can make us sick. As dust, the eyelash and cotton threads and pollen and the mites receive a new lease on life and, no doubt, a new meaning. Whatever threats or promises it harbors, we can rest assured that it will eternally return, not as dramatically as ghosts or specters but quietly and cumulatively, like the falling snow. We cannot do away with it for good, since no matter how much we try to “clean” it, we only unsettle and move the unbearably light refuse from one place to another. Dust does not limit itself to the surfaces of the things it covers in fact, it knows no distinction between the inside and the outside.įinally, dust is ineliminable. Due to its high mobility and its smallness, it can penetrate our bodies. It is at once a random community of what has been and what is yet to be, and a figure of dispersion: a loose assemblage that barely holds together, always ready to catch a ride on the flows of air and relocate elsewhere…or to fall apart. Dust is also an ephemeral gathering place for dust mites and fungi. Valley fever is a stark reminder about the nature of dust, which, seemingly innocuous and domesticated, is an always present potential danger pervading the atmosphere, well beyond the confines of the households it is usually associated with.ĭust is a ledger of past existence: dead skin cells and plant pollen, hair and paper fibers. One breath can result in a lifetime of suffering, or even death. As Dana Goodyear recently described in The New Yorker, in the most severe cases, airborne fungi infect patients’ lungs, bone marrow, and brain. Valley fever is transmitted by fungi-laced dust that blows from dumping and construction sites, as well as from the deserts of Arizona, California, Nevada, New Mexico, and Texas. This unique work will be welcomed by all historians who want to think about what it is they do.Across the American Southwest, dust has become lethal. Steedman begins by asserting that in recent years much attention has been paid to the archive by those working in the humanities and social sciences she calls this practice “archivization.” By definition, the archive is the repository of “that which will not go away,” and the book goes on to suggest that, just like dust, the “matter of history” can never go away or be erased. Drawing on her own published and unpublished writing, Carolyn Steedman has produced a sustained argument about the way in which history writing belongs to the currents of thought shaping the modern world. Dust: The Archive and Cultural History considers our stubborn set of beliefs about an objective material worldinherited from the nineteenth centurywith which modern history writing and its lack of such a belief, attempts to grapple. In this witty, engaging, and challenging book, Carolyn Steedman has produced an originaland sometimes irreverentinvestigation into how modern historiography has developed.
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