We are delighted to highlight a forthcoming book by Digital Scholarship Postdoctoral Fellow Dr Dipali Mathur. Available to be Poisoned: Toxicity as a Form of Life is released in October 2022.
Long before we were told we had to ‘live with’ COVID-19, we were already tacitly being told to ‘live with’ toxicity. In Available to be Poisoned, Dipali Mathur contends that the saturation of the planet and its multiple inhabitants with toxic chemicals is not the “inevitable” price of progress but marks a deliberate and violent relationship with the Earth and its "others" born of the entwined histories of colonialism and capitalism. This book explores the broader question of what it means to ‘live with’ toxicity as a condition of life in the 21st century, particularly for disadvantaged communities in India. It makes the argument that the geographically uneven exposure to toxicity is a deliberate strategy of global neoliberalism to ensure that power is concentrated in the hands of the few.
Mathur offers the innovative concept of “toxicity as a form of life” to signpost the normalisation of living with toxic exposure as a new form of life under neoliberal capitalism. Chronic toxic exposure, she argues, is warfare. Through Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and governmentality, Mathur analyses how the nation-state uses toxicity to control populations already existing on the fringes of our global political economy. Drawing on three evocative case studies from India - the legacy of the Green Revolution, the 1984 Bhopal Gas Disaster, and the COVID-19 pandemic - Mathur shows how exposure to toxicity is weaponized to make certain populations and the places they inhabit “available to be poisoned.”
Dipali Mathur completed her PhD in Environmental Humanities from the University of Wollongong Australia in 2022. She was awarded the “Examiners’ Commendation for Outstanding Thesis Award” for her thesis and earned a book contract with Lexington Books-Rowman & Littlefield for publishing it as a monograph. Prior to commencing her doctoral research in Australia, Dipali obtained her Bachelor’s and Master’s Degrees (with a first division) in English Literature from Sri Venkateswara College, University of Delhi, India and then went on to teach English Literature at D.U. for three years. She is currently an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wollongong Australia and is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Available to be Poisoned: Toxicity as a Form of Life is her first book.
A 30% discount is available when using the code LXFANDF30 at checkout: https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781666919813/Available-to-Be-Poisoned-Toxicity-as-a-Form-of-Life