Continent in Dust - (Critical Environments: Nature, Science, and Politics) by Jerry C Zee (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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?

From the Back Cover

"This brave and original book argues for the experimental nature of both state governance and landscape terraformation. Wind-sand shifts between dunes and storms, and shifting with it are policies, protests, and the flow of particulates across continents. Take the politics seriously: in the open-endedness of weather systems, 'China' will never be the same."--Anna Tsing, coeditor of Feral Atlas: The More-than-Human Anthropocene

"What could be more timely than an ethnography of strange weather? In Jerry Zee's radical anthropology, form is displaced by temporality, practice defined through experiment, and the radical uncertainty of climate generates a new conceptual vocabulary that compresses matter, metaphor, and politics. Continent of Dust marks a new and vital stage in the ongoing reimagining of nature in anthropological discourse."--Hugh Raffles, author of The Book of Unconformities: Speculations on Lost Time

"Through arresting accounts of wind-sand embroilments along a transcontinental airstream, Continent in Dust shows us how to discern and conceptualize forms of life and governance emerging in the slips and accretions of blown ground and changing weather. Necessary and sustaining reading for getting on in the planetary Sinocene."--Timothy Choy, author of Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong

Review Quotes

"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"

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

"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"

"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"

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

"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"

About the Author

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