Description

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In China, the weather has changed. Decades of reform have been shadowed by a changing meteorological normal: seasonal dust storms and spectacular episodes of air pollution have reworked physical and political relations between land and air in China and downwind. Continent in Dust offers an anthropology of strange weather, focusing on intersections among statecraft, landscape, atmosphere, and society. Traveling from state engineering programs that attempt to choreograph the movement of mobile dunes in the interior, to newly reconfigured bodies and airspaces in Beijing, and beyond, this book explores contemporary China as a weather system in the making: what would it mean to understand “the rise of China” literally, as the country itself rises into the air?

 

About the Author

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Jerry C. Zee is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University.

Praise For…

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"Continent in Dust is a timely and critical intervention in the roles and relationships of China and Asia in weather-world-systems. . . . It is a welcome contribution to a growing conversation about how material, ecological and meteorological phenomena are mutually implicated with practices, knowledges and experiences of sovereignty, ethics, and sociality."
 
— International Journal of Asian Studies

"Continent in Dust is a literary adventure."
— Anthropology and Humanism

"Continent in Dust is an ambitious and intriguing book. A delightful read which should be widely utilized in teaching and discussions on contemporary China and planetary health and change."
— The China Quarterly

"More than anything, Continent in Dust is an essential intervention into recent writings about the arts of living amid planetary uncertainty, precarity and ruin. Reading this book is like seeing the blue sky emerge from a dust storm’s haze. Jerry Zee shows us how to reorient our senses and conceptual toolkits to see onto other possible worlds."
— Inner Asia

"The book reframes how we think and write about practical action and responses in the face of climate emergency."
— Publics Books

"A groundbreaking book on the management of dust storm and air quality in China. . . . Zee’s book is an enduring meditation on the consequences of China’s modernisation."
— China Perspectives