In his introduction to Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible, Joseph Amato observes that dust has long been “associated with the lowliest things….neither a subject worthy of reflection nor meritorious enough to serve a history of smallness” (4-5). Although we inhabit a world of dust—our feet reconfiguring it with each step, our skin bearing its mark, our lungs inhaling motes of it in every breath—dust connotes the invisible, the ephemeral, matter pulverized into an unrecognizable, and thus unremarkable, form.[1] It seems little wonder, then, that for many materialists, the substance ostensibly does not carry the same philosophical or scholarly weight that other matter does. Over a century ago in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, for instance, Engels traced land’s transformation from a material belonging to the earth to “a commodity to be bought and sold” (203), yet dust is only obliquely implicated in his discourse on soil. Merleau-Ponty does not mention dust in Phenomenology of Perception or in his final manuscript, The Visible and the Invisible, much as we might expect given the latter’s title. More recently, William Cohen and Ryan Johnson do acknowledge “dirt, waste, pollution, abjection, disgust, mess, garbage, rubbish, [and] dust” (ix) in their introduction to Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life, though they consider dust in the larger context of filth studies rather than new materialism—and as a subset of dirt at that. And, in their important 2010 book, New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost posit new ways of thinking about materiality in the twenty-first century, yet they, like their materialist predecessors, do not consider dust as part of their “reprisal of materialism” (3). In order to begin the process of addressing this dearth of dust in my talk today, I will first trace dust’s theoretical and material underpinnings in previous and current fields of materialist thought; then move on to a discussion of dust in relation to the environment, history, and different bioregions in North America; and finally, conclude by speculating on the role of dust within twentieth century literature. It is time that we reconsider “the lowliest [of] things” not merely as an inert collection of particles, but a form of matter in its own right, one that links materialist studies of the past to those of the present.
Theoretical and Material Dust
“How could we ignore the power of matter and the ways it materializes in our ordinary experiences or fail to acknowledge the primacy of matter in our theories?” asks Coole and Frost in their introduction to New Materialisms (1). In seeking a common material thread across the disciplines—from the physical sciences, to the social sciences, to the humanities—we must turn to a substance that undergirds each of them. Dust is that substance, its structure containing flecks of our sloughed off skin; the cellulose castings of plant life; pollen; fungus spores; and the desiccated carcasses of dust mites, bacteria, and other organisms that populate the microenvironment.[2]
As we begin to theorize dust’s place within materialist tradition, we do not reject previous theorists’ work, but rather, enhance their conceptualizations of this unique form of matter. Looking to the past, we find references to dust in materialist analyses of labor practices, hygiene, domestic spaces, and many other areas—yet it is not pursued as a material thread of its own. For instance, Charles Thackrah’s Effects of Arts was one of the first nineteenth century texts to correlate dust as a material cost of labor, his 1832 reading of dust foreshadowing structural Marxism.[3] In Marx’s Capital, Volume I, we locate dust in his critique of deplorable working conditions, factories where “dust and dirt…are disengaged, irritat[ing] the air passages, and giv[ing] rise to cough and difficulty breathing” (500). We find it, too, in Jacques Derrida’s discussion of nature, culture, and language in On Grammatology, where he compares them to an interconnected “mass of roots, soil, and sediments of all sorts” (161)—Derrida’s “sediments,” we might speculate, even encompassing dust.[4]
Another reason for addressing the materiality of dust is its role in microbiology and immunology.[5] Over the past several decades, researchers in these fields have studied the relationship between a lack of beneficial household dust and increased incidences of childhood asthma, while others have hypothesized that our relatively recent obsession with hand sanitizers and anti-bacterial soaps may be contributing not only to respiratory issues but even food allergies. Conversely, too much household dust exacerbates pulmonary disorders, the substance a haven for dust mites, which, after consuming particles of our dead skin, excrete waste up to 20 times per day and produce a new generation every three weeks, according to the Manual of Environmental Microbiology.[6]
Dust is also paramount in recent discoveries in the fields of physics and cosmology. The extraplanetary dust particles found in the comas of comets such as the comet ISON, which passed through the inner solar system a year ago, or embedded in asteroids themselves are up to “fifty percent organic material by weight” (24), according to Hannah Holmes.[7] In their 2011 article in Nature, Sun Kwok and Yong Zang concur, detailing the organic elements present in cosmic dust: aromatic compounds (present in the protein building blocks of all living things), aliphatic compounds (such as methane), and other organic matter (possibly even nucleic acids—the building blocks of DNA). With the successful landing of the European Space Agency’s Philae on the comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko ten years after its mission began, scientists continue to learn about cosmic dust and its relationship to our own terrestrial dust.
Environmental, Historical, and Bioregional Dust
Let us turn now to dust’s material role in history and the environment. Dust is found in nature and in our homes, in rural and urban spaces, from the sub-zero heights of the Himalayas to the scalding basin of Death Valley. On this continent alone, we encounter the powdery silica dust of the Great Lakes, the red clay dust of Georgia, the salt dust of Utah’s Flats, the rain-scented dust of the Pacific Northwest, and myriad other dusts. One theorist who sought the dust of this continent was Jean Baudrillard.[8] Conducting research for his book America, Baudrillard traversed the United States from the Great Plains to the Grand Canyon, from New York to California, in search of its material essence: I went in search of…mineral [America]….I sought that upturning of depth that can be seen in the striated spaces, the reliefs of salt and stone, the canyons where the fossil river flows down, the immemorial abyss of slowness that shows itself in erosion and geology" (5). As we observe in this passage , Baudrillard gestures toward the minute particles brought into being through eons of erosion, “America” revealed to him through its material fragments. It is not too far of a leap to imagine the unspoken dust in between the “striated spaces,” particularly where he names salt and other minerals eroded by wind, water, and time. As Baudrillard suggests, we can read the environment through the minutest materials, the past as much recorded in photographs and typeset as it is in the archive we call dust.
The twentieth century was arguably a century of dust, perhaps no more so than the 1930s.[9] During that decades, a mosaic of dust swathed across the seemingly infallible farmland of the Great Plains, revealing dust’s power on an environmental scale not often witnessed outside of volcanic eruptions. In The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl, author Timothy Egan describes the exact magnitude of that dust: “At its peak, the Dust Bowl covered one hundred million acres. Dusters swept over the northern prairie as well, but the epicenter was the southern plains. An area the size of Pennsylvania was in ruin and on the run. More than a quarter-million people fled the Dust Bowl in the 1930s” (9).[10] Millions of granules of dust stretching over millions of acres were powerful enough to radically unsettle the geographical contours of the Great Plains, heedless of the manmade borders between states such as Kansas and Oklahoma or the distinction between one family’s farm and their neighbor’s.[11] Dust writ its volatile and relentless power across the face of the continent, featuring prominently in first-person narrative accounts of the decade, in popular songs and films, and in Dorothea Lange’s black and white images of Okies and other migrants searching for a better life in California—her stark photographs haunting us to this day.[12]
Commingled in our historical relationship with dust is an almost subconscious fear of the emptiness and Otherness that often accompanies dusty regions. As J. Douglas Canfield writes in his 2001 book Mavericks on the Border, it is the Borderlands between the United States and Mexico, and between the Great Plains and Northern Plains of Canada, which are most often characterized this way. Canfield argues that these dusty regions exist in the cultural imaginary as void-like spaces “without essence, without essential meaning” (4).[13] Such dustphobic taxonomies run deep in places where dust is an inextricable part of the landscape. We cannot help but wonder if our desire to colonize, cultivate, and transform this corridor of the continent is not driven, at least in part, by our deep-seeded disgust of dust itself—and its seeming lack of materiality. In the Plains, like the Desert Southwest and other dusty regions, dust is everywhere, sticking to our flesh and tornadoing in our minds in what Tom Lynch terms “a continual interfusion of self and environment” (xv).[14] Dust is a material that forces us to recognize our smallness in stark relief next to Nature’s grandeur, its time measured not in decades, like our lifespans, but in epochs. In doing so, we risk confronting what Lynch defines as “nada” (93).
Textual Dust
Whether the nada of desert dust or the cataclysmic dust that once engulfed the Plains, dust not only pervades much of our material history, but the literature written in response to that past. It encompasses Cather’s Nebraska, Fitzgerald’s valley of ashes, Wright’s Chicago, Steinbeck’s Oklahoma, Stegner’s North Dakota, and Kerouac’s and McCarthy’s roads, among so many others. In the novel, dust came to occupy many discursive positions, moving from disgust to more nuanced material categories such as destitution. In the following section, I will briefly sketch dust’s materiality through one such text.
In her 1918 novel My Ántonia, author Willa Cather depicts her titular character’s body through a veil of dust. Dust forms an essential part of Cather’s opus, the writer infusing it throughout her textual geography.[15] In one such scene in the novel, “Ántonia…washed the field dust from [her] hands and face…at the wash-basin by the kitchen door” (99). Ántonia hastens to scrub the field dust off her hands before Jim Burden sees her for the first time since they were children, signaling her shame at the difference between her tanned, dust-covered hands and Jim’s clean, white hands—hands that are not exposed daily to the unyielding sun and elements. This dust marks her status as a laboring woman compared to the whiteness of the upper-middle class and wealthy women that Jim encounters in New York, and the one he eventually marries.[16] In contrast to Ántonia’s relationship to dust, Jim fondly associates the substance with the carefree days of his youth in rural Nebraska, the “dust of the farmyard” (110) that he and Ántonia played in as children carrying a much different connotation for him.
In another scene, Cather details how farm dust clings to Ántonia’s chest, the location of that dust important. Jim observes Ántonia walking in from the field, noting her flesh, “sunburned, sweaty, her dress open at the neck, and her throat and chest dust-plastered” (100). Here, Cather emphasizes how the dust alights on Ántonia’s “chest,” or breasts. The picture the author creates is of an earthy woman, dust and sweat intermingling in her pores.[17] Jim’s gaze eroticizes her body, though for Ántonia, the dust is her reality, the (mate)reality, of her circumstances. This union of dust and flesh reflects how dust was transposed from the land to the skin in twentieth century fiction, imbricating gender and the body in the material.[18]
Conclusion
If we peer closely enough at a handful of dust, we glimpse traces of what Coole and Frost might label its “restlessness and intransigence” (1), a matter containing vestiges of multiple places in its particles. Looking to the past, in ancient Greece, dust was once thought to be the smallest form of matter; from the Latin, the word pollen directly translates to dust. It is evident in Newtonian mechanics; a building block of Marxist thought; inherent to the work of Engels; and, in the present, a font of potential for new materialists. Dust, too, compels scholars in field such as biopolitics, the substance heedless of the arbitrary human constructs of borders; and common to all nations, races, and regions. Dust disrupts each of these, dislocating the notion of a discrete, singular, human subject.
Implying a crossing on a grand scale, dust is the only record that remains of the earliest human migrations, the footprints of our predecessors pressed into solidified sand and dust.[19] Dust is simultaneously the possible source to which all life on earth owes its existence and the eventual fate of everything in the universe, from the cosmic bodies of stars to our own human bodies.[20] Part of our mortality is acknowledging that we will eventually decompose into dust in such a way that the body ceases to be us and instead becomes a new material, one akin to Merleau-Ponty’s explication of the pebble transmuting into sand.[21] As such, we find ourselves compelled to reflect on dust’s role in our own materiality. It is not part of some abstract ontology, but underlies everything, perhaps even consciousness itself.
Given all of this materiality, I will conclude by once more asking why is there such a disregard for dust in materialist theory? Perhaps its omission from early materialist texts that precludes new materialists from considering dust as part of a genealogy of materialism. Whatever the reason, dust is now more than ever emerging as a complex, material phenomenon, the substance refusing a simple classification—it is neither wholly organic nor entirely a byproduct of human industry, not separate from discourses of power, language, and values but embedded within each of these systems. What is at stake here is nothing less than a restructuring of material tradition to encompass dust and other neglected or marginalized forms of matter. In privileging dust, we remove it from the dustbin of history, unearthing alternate ways of perceiving its materiality in relation to the environment, the text, and even the self.
-- Aimee M. Allard, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Notes
[1] Amato argues that “[a]ll matter could be made dust by force, fire, or rot” (20). In other words, everything we know—including ourselves—is merely an earlier incarnation of the matter we call dust.
[2] See Amato, Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible, p. 4.
[3] See Charles Thackrah’s 1832 book, The Effects of Arts, Trades, and Professions, and of Civic States and Habits of Living, on Health and Longevity: With Suggestions for the Removal of Many of the Agents which Produce Disease, and Shorten the Duration of Life. His findings suggested that laborers who were daily exposed to “dusty vapours” had an increased risk of pulmonary disease or early death, an issue that unions would later take up.
[4] See Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak.
[5] According to the 2010 paper “Observed 20th Century Desert Dust Variability: Impact on Climate and Biogeochemistry” in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, the amount of airborne dust worldwide more than doubled during the course of the 20th century.
[6] For a more comprehensive microbiological examination of dust, see the Manual of Environmental Microbiology, edited by Christon J. Hurst.
[7] See The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things.
[8] This is Chris Turner’s translation from the original French.
[9] This includes the dust stirred up at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, during the Wright brothers’ historic 1903 flight; the first automobiles carving ruts into dust and dirt roads; dust’s swathe of devastation across the center of the country during the Dust Bowl; mushroom clouds set against a backdrop of desert dust in places like White Sands, New Mexico, during the mid-1940s and the Nevada Test Site in the early 1950s; volcanic dust released into the atmosphere in the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens; dust settling in the aftermath of Oklahoma City just six years before the dust of September 11th.
[10] Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s offers an equally compelling account of the Dust Bowl from an environmental history point of view.
[11] In their article “Economics of Dust,” Helen Lloyd, Peter Brimblecombe, and Katy Lithgow explore the social and monetary “costs” of dust.
[12] In his book Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination, Charles Shindo suggests that images of the Dust Bowl were themselves infused with the emotional residue of this historical cataclysm, the regions covered in dust still remembered in our collective imaginations they appeared over 70 years ago (60).
[13] Canfield labels this fear of dust as “the ultimate abject” (192).
[14] Quoted from Xerophilia (2008), p. xv.
[15] Dust is not only central to the setting or titular character in My Ántonia; it is the novel. The pages of the book itself are made from the wood dust of trees, that dust then mixed with water to form pulp. That pulp is then bleached and pressed into the paper that makes up the physical text.
[16] William Cohen concurs, describing how dust, like other “filth represents a cultural location at which the human body, social hierarchy, psychological subjectivity, and material objects converge” (viii).
[17] In her book Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990, Patricia Yaeger offers an interesting reading of dirt and the female body. While Yaegar’s analysis is confined to women writing in the American South—writers such as Alice Walker writer characters who take pleasure in dirt—perhaps Ántonia takes a similar pleasure in dust at times, while detesting it in other moments. Such a reading subverts the notion of dust as disgusting, suggesting that Cather may have infused the material with multifaceted layers of complexity.
[18] In her critical text Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, anthropologist Mary Douglas examines in much greater detail how dust moved from a physical mark on the skin to part of a cultural concept of disgust. Thus, our visceral response to signs of decay or death because they could contaminate our bodies or lead to illness or death transferred onto objects, sites, and people, which were deemed filthy and Other.
[19] Nicholas Ashton, curator of the British Museum, recently announced that archaeologists discovered 800,000-year old human footprints—the oldest outside Africa—in Happisburgh. See the British Museum blog for images of these footprints: http://blog.britishmuseum.org/2014/02/07/the-earliest-human-footprints-outside-africa-2/.
[20] Gravity’s pull uses dust to shape planets, and, here on earth, wind and water eventually erode even the tallest mountains into dust. Like the mountain and the mite, our fate is no nobler.
[21] As the pebble is eroded by water and wind, at a certain point it ceases to be the same object we call “pebble” and transitions into the substance we call sand (161).
Works Cited
Amato, Joseph A. Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 2000. Print.
Ashton, Nicholas. “The Earliest Human Footprints outside of Africa.” The British Museum, 7 Feb. 2014. Web. 28 Feb. 2014.
Baudrillard, Jean. Amérique (America). 1988. Trans. Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso, 1988. Print.
Canfield, J. Douglas. Mavericks on the Border. Lexington, KY: Lexington U P, 2001. Print.
Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. 1918. New York: Penguin Classics, 1994. Print.
Cohen, William A., and Ryan Johnson, eds. Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Print.
Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC and London: Duke U P, 2010. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie). 1967. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 1976. Print.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966. Print.
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.
Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. 1884. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972. Print.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. London: Penguin, 2010. Print.
Holmes, Hannah. The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, The Big Consequences of Little Things. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Print.
Hurst, Christon, et al., eds. The Manual of Environmental Microbiology. 3rd ed. Washington, D.C.: ASM Press, 2003. Print.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper and Row, 2003. Print.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. 1957. New York: Viking Penguin, 2003. Print.
Kwok, Sun, and Yong Zang. “Mixed Aromatic-Aliphatic Organic Nanoparticles as Carriers of Unidentified Infrared Emission Features.” Nature 479 (7371): 80-83. JSTOR. Web. 4 Mar. 2014.
Lynch, Tom. Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech U P, 2008. Print.
Mahowald, N. M., et al. “Observed 20th Century Desert Dust Variability: Impact on Climate and Biogeochemistry.” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. 10 (2010): 10,875-10, 893. Web. 31 Dec. 2014.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy. (Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie). 1867. Trans. from 3rd German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: International Publishers, 1967. Print.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage International, 2006. Print.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology and Perception. (Phénomènologie de la perception). 1945. Trans. Kegan Paul. London and New York: Routledge, 1962. Print.
---. The Visible and the Invisible. (Visible et l’invisible). 1964. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern U P, 1968. Print.
Shindo, Charles. Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination. Lawrence, KS: U of Kansas P, 1997. Print.
Stegner, Wallace. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. 1943. New York: Penguin, 1991. Print.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 1939. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006. Print.
Thackrah, Charles. The Effects of Arts, Trades, and Professions, and of Civic States and Habits of Living, on Health and Longevity: With Suggestions for the Removal of Many of the Agents which Produce Disease, and Shorten the Duration of Life. London: Longman, et al., 1832. Print.
Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Oxford and New York: Oxford U P, 1979. Print.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998. Print.
Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 2000. Print.
[1] Amato argues that “[a]ll matter could be made dust by force, fire, or rot” (20). In other words, everything we know—including ourselves—is merely an earlier incarnation of the matter we call dust.
[2] See Amato, Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible, p. 4.
[3] See Charles Thackrah’s 1832 book, The Effects of Arts, Trades, and Professions, and of Civic States and Habits of Living, on Health and Longevity: With Suggestions for the Removal of Many of the Agents which Produce Disease, and Shorten the Duration of Life. His findings suggested that laborers who were daily exposed to “dusty vapours” had an increased risk of pulmonary disease or early death, an issue that unions would later take up.
[4] See Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak.
[5] According to the 2010 paper “Observed 20th Century Desert Dust Variability: Impact on Climate and Biogeochemistry” in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, the amount of airborne dust worldwide more than doubled during the course of the 20th century.
[6] For a more comprehensive microbiological examination of dust, see the Manual of Environmental Microbiology, edited by Christon J. Hurst.
[7] See The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, the Big Consequences of Little Things.
[8] This is Chris Turner’s translation from the original French.
[9] This includes the dust stirred up at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, during the Wright brothers’ historic 1903 flight; the first automobiles carving ruts into dust and dirt roads; dust’s swathe of devastation across the center of the country during the Dust Bowl; mushroom clouds set against a backdrop of desert dust in places like White Sands, New Mexico, during the mid-1940s and the Nevada Test Site in the early 1950s; volcanic dust released into the atmosphere in the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens; dust settling in the aftermath of Oklahoma City just six years before the dust of September 11th.
[10] Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s offers an equally compelling account of the Dust Bowl from an environmental history point of view.
[11] In their article “Economics of Dust,” Helen Lloyd, Peter Brimblecombe, and Katy Lithgow explore the social and monetary “costs” of dust.
[12] In his book Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination, Charles Shindo suggests that images of the Dust Bowl were themselves infused with the emotional residue of this historical cataclysm, the regions covered in dust still remembered in our collective imaginations they appeared over 70 years ago (60).
[13] Canfield labels this fear of dust as “the ultimate abject” (192).
[14] Quoted from Xerophilia (2008), p. xv.
[15] Dust is not only central to the setting or titular character in My Ántonia; it is the novel. The pages of the book itself are made from the wood dust of trees, that dust then mixed with water to form pulp. That pulp is then bleached and pressed into the paper that makes up the physical text.
[16] William Cohen concurs, describing how dust, like other “filth represents a cultural location at which the human body, social hierarchy, psychological subjectivity, and material objects converge” (viii).
[17] In her book Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990, Patricia Yaeger offers an interesting reading of dirt and the female body. While Yaegar’s analysis is confined to women writing in the American South—writers such as Alice Walker writer characters who take pleasure in dirt—perhaps Ántonia takes a similar pleasure in dust at times, while detesting it in other moments. Such a reading subverts the notion of dust as disgusting, suggesting that Cather may have infused the material with multifaceted layers of complexity.
[18] In her critical text Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, anthropologist Mary Douglas examines in much greater detail how dust moved from a physical mark on the skin to part of a cultural concept of disgust. Thus, our visceral response to signs of decay or death because they could contaminate our bodies or lead to illness or death transferred onto objects, sites, and people, which were deemed filthy and Other.
[19] Nicholas Ashton, curator of the British Museum, recently announced that archaeologists discovered 800,000-year old human footprints—the oldest outside Africa—in Happisburgh. See the British Museum blog for images of these footprints: http://blog.britishmuseum.org/2014/02/07/the-earliest-human-footprints-outside-africa-2/.
[20] Gravity’s pull uses dust to shape planets, and, here on earth, wind and water eventually erode even the tallest mountains into dust. Like the mountain and the mite, our fate is no nobler.
[21] As the pebble is eroded by water and wind, at a certain point it ceases to be the same object we call “pebble” and transitions into the substance we call sand (161).
Works Cited
Amato, Joseph A. Dust: A History of the Small and the Invisible. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 2000. Print.
Ashton, Nicholas. “The Earliest Human Footprints outside of Africa.” The British Museum, 7 Feb. 2014. Web. 28 Feb. 2014.
Baudrillard, Jean. Amérique (America). 1988. Trans. Chris Turner. London and New York: Verso, 1988. Print.
Canfield, J. Douglas. Mavericks on the Border. Lexington, KY: Lexington U P, 2001. Print.
Cather, Willa. My Ántonia. 1918. New York: Penguin Classics, 1994. Print.
Cohen, William A., and Ryan Johnson, eds. Filth: Dirt, Disgust, and Modern Life. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2005. Print.
Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC and London: Duke U P, 2010. Print.
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie). 1967. Trans. Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins U P, 1976. Print.
Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966. Print.
Egan, Timothy. The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Print.
Engels, Friedrich. The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State. 1884. New York: Pathfinder Press, 1972. Print.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1925. London: Penguin, 2010. Print.
Holmes, Hannah. The Secret Life of Dust: From the Cosmos to the Kitchen Counter, The Big Consequences of Little Things. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. Print.
Hurst, Christon, et al., eds. The Manual of Environmental Microbiology. 3rd ed. Washington, D.C.: ASM Press, 2003. Print.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper and Row, 2003. Print.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road. 1957. New York: Viking Penguin, 2003. Print.
Kwok, Sun, and Yong Zang. “Mixed Aromatic-Aliphatic Organic Nanoparticles as Carriers of Unidentified Infrared Emission Features.” Nature 479 (7371): 80-83. JSTOR. Web. 4 Mar. 2014.
Lynch, Tom. Xerophilia: Ecocritical Explorations in Southwestern Literature. Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech U P, 2008. Print.
Mahowald, N. M., et al. “Observed 20th Century Desert Dust Variability: Impact on Climate and Biogeochemistry.” Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. 10 (2010): 10,875-10, 893. Web. 31 Dec. 2014.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy. (Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie). 1867. Trans. from 3rd German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: International Publishers, 1967. Print.
McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage International, 2006. Print.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology and Perception. (Phénomènologie de la perception). 1945. Trans. Kegan Paul. London and New York: Routledge, 1962. Print.
---. The Visible and the Invisible. (Visible et l’invisible). 1964. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. Evanston, IL: Northwestern U P, 1968. Print.
Shindo, Charles. Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination. Lawrence, KS: U of Kansas P, 1997. Print.
Stegner, Wallace. The Big Rock Candy Mountain. 1943. New York: Penguin, 1991. Print.
Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. 1939. New York: Penguin Classics, 2006. Print.
Thackrah, Charles. The Effects of Arts, Trades, and Professions, and of Civic States and Habits of Living, on Health and Longevity: With Suggestions for the Removal of Many of the Agents which Produce Disease, and Shorten the Duration of Life. London: Longman, et al., 1832. Print.
Worster, Donald. Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s. Oxford and New York: Oxford U P, 1979. Print.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. 1940. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998. Print.
Yaeger, Patricia. Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 1930-1990. Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 2000. Print.
No comments:
Post a Comment