How aluminum enabled a high-speed, gravity-defying American modernity even as other parts of the world paid the price in environmental damage and political turmoil. Aluminum shaped the twentieth century. It enabled high-speed travel and gravity-defying flight. It was the material of a streamlined aesthetic that came to represent modernity. And it became an essential ingredient in industrial and domestic products that ranged from airplanes and cars to designer chairs and artificial Christmas trees. It entered modern homes as packaging, foil, pots and pans and even infiltrated our bodies through food, medicine, and cosmetics. In Aluminum Dreams, Mimi Sheller describes how the materiality and meaning of aluminum transformed modern life and continues to shape the world today. Aluminum, Sheller tells us, changed mobility and mobilized modern life. It enabled air power, the space age and moon landings. Yet, as Sheller makes clear, aluminum was important not only in twentieth-century technology, innovation, architecture, and design but also in underpinning global military power, uneven development, and crucial environmental and health concerns. Sheller describes aluminum''s shiny utopia but also its dark side. The unintended consequences of aluminum''s widespread use include struggles for sovereignty and resource control in Africa, India, and the Caribbean; the unleashing of multinational corporations; and the pollution of the earth through mining and smelting (and the battle to save it). Using a single material as an entry point to understanding a global history of modernization and its implications for the future, Aluminum Dreams forces us to ask: How do we assemble the material culture of modernity and what are its environmental consequences? Aluminum Dreams includes a generous selection of striking images of iconic aluminum designs, many in color, drawn from advertisements by Alcoa, Bohn, Kaiser, and other major corporations, pamphlets, films, and exhibitions. chnology, innovation, architecture, and design but also in underpinning global military power, uneven development, and crucial environmental and health concerns. Sheller describes aluminum''s shiny utopia but also its dark side. The unintended consequences of aluminum''s widespread use include struggles for sovereignty and resource control in Africa, India, and the Caribbean; the unleashing of multinational corporations; and the pollution of the earth through mining and smelting (and the battle to save it). Using a single material as an entry point to understanding a global history of modernization and its implications for the future, Aluminum Dreams forces us to ask: How do we assemble the material culture of modernity and what are its environmental consequences? Aluminum Dreams includes a generous selection of striking images of iconic aluminum designs, many in color, drawn from advertisements by Alcoa, Bohn, Kaiser, and other major corporations, pamphlets, films, and exhibitions. chnology, innovation, architecture, and design but also in underpinning global military power, uneven development, and crucial environmental and health concerns. Sheller describes aluminum''s shiny utopia but also its dark side. The unintended consequences of aluminum''s widespread use include struggles for sovereignty and resource control in Africa, India, and the Caribbean; the unleashing of multinational corporations; and the pollution of the earth through mining and smelting (and the battle to save it). Using a single material as an entry point to understanding a global history of modernization and its implications for the future, Aluminum Dreams forces us to ask: How do we assemble the material culture of modernity and what are its environmental consequences? Aluminum Dreams includes a generous selection of striking images of iconic aluminum designs, many in color, drawn from advertisements by Alcoa, Bohn, Kaiser, and other major corporations, pamphlets, films, and exhibitions. chnology, innovation, architecture, and design but also in underpinning global military power, uneven development, and crucial environmental and health concerns. Sheller describes aluminum''s shiny utopia but also its dark side. The unintended consequences of aluminum''s widespread use include struggles for sovereignty and resource control in Africa, India, and the Caribbean; the unleashing of multinational corporations; and the pollution of the earth through mining and smelting (and the battle to save it). Using a single material as an entry point to understanding a global history of modernization and its implications for the future, Aluminum Dreams forces us to ask: How do we assemble the material culture of modernity and what are its environmental consequences? Aluminum Dreams includes a generous selection of striking images of iconic aluminum designs, many in color, drawn from advertisements by Alcoa, Bohn, Kaiser, and other major corporations, pamphlets, films, and exhibitions. logy, innovation, architecture, and design but also in underpinning global military power, uneven development, and crucial environmental and health concerns. Sheller describes aluminum''s shiny utopia but also its dark side. The unintended consequences of aluminum''s widespread use include struggles for sovereignty and resource control in Africa, India, and the Caribbean; the unleashing of multinational corporations; and the pollution of the earth through mining and smelting (and the battle to save it). Using a single material as an entry point to understanding a global history of modernization and its implications for the future, Aluminum Dreams forces us to ask: How do we assemble the material culture of modernity and what are its environmental consequences? Aluminum Dreams includes a generous selection of striking images of iconic aluminum designs, many in color, drawn from advertisements by Alcoa, Bohn, Kaiser, and other major corporations, pamphlets, films, and exhibitions.

Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (MIT Press)

Engineering & Transportation

Mimi Sheller

Engineering

The MIT Press

"An important work of Caribbean scholarship. . . . Clearly written and making skillful use of varied sources, this study shows that the struggles of former slaves and their descendants to achieve a real freedom, though ruthlessly crushed in the 19th century, are central to the continuing process of emancipation and democratization in the ‘Western' world."-- O. Nigel Bolland, Colgate UniversityMimi Sheller's ground-breaking comparative study analyzes the struggle for freedom and democracy in two Caribbean societies in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery.Pairing the revolutionary Republic of Haiti with the British colony of Jamaica, the author shows how peasants in the 19th-century Caribbean developed a radical critique of elite liberalism and constructed an alternative Pan-Caribbean African identity. Comparing two major peasant rebellions and the relation between them, she describes how Haitian and Jamaican survivors of slavery contributed to the making of democracy in the West.Scholars of the Caribbean and of postemancipation societies will find this book essential. At the same time, the issues Sheller addresses on democracy, citizenship, and subaltern publics will also be useful to the broader communities of sociologists, political scientists, and students of colonial and postcolonial studies.Mimi Sheller is a lecturer in the Sociology Department at Lancaster University in England. She is the author of articles in Theory and Society, Slavery and Abolition, New West Indian Guide, and Plantation Society in the Americas.

Democracy After Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica (Warwick University Caribbean Studies)

Politics & Social Sciences

Politics & Government

Macmillan Caribbean

Islands After Tourism Escaping the Monocultures of Leisure

George Papam

Matilde Córboda Azcárate

Angelos Varvarousis

Arturo Desimone

Kyklada press

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Books by Mimi Sheller