Sensing Chennai from the air with Barad

Source abstract

This paper offers a relational strategy for approaching the urban as elemental, focusing on the airs of Chennai in South India. It contributes to the field of elemental urbanism, which is concerned with how earthly forces pervade and come to matter in and shape contemporary cities. It approaches these questions through a performative, Baradian methodology, whose analytical starting point is the author’s immersion in Chennai’s airs, from which what unfolds is then traced. After reviewing recent literature on the elemental and the atmospheric, the paper is divided into four sections that correspond with the aerial phenomena the author encountered in Chennai – breezes, cyclones, waves, and particulates. The paper incorporates two modes of writing – one embodied and intimate, the other historical and analytical. They link the personal to the political and are meant to be read diffractively through one another, to engender new insights and understandings of the relations between the two. The paper concludes by revisiting Barad’s methodology, drawing out its ethical implications and suggesting an avenue for future elemental urban research.