mCenter Director Mimi Sheller discusses her forthcoming book Aluminum Dreams: Lightness, Speed, Modernity (MIT Press, 2014)
For more information please contact mimi.sheller@drexel.edu
* please note that the European pronunciation of “aluminium” has been used throughout for a global audience
Posted in Research
Tagged Aluminum, Caribbean, Sustainability, Technology, Tourism, Transport
Aluminum has become the most important single bulk material of modern warfare. No fighting is possible, and no war can be carried to a successful conclusion today, without using and destroying vast quantities of aluminum.– Dewey Anderson, 1951
Dr. Mimi Sheller will be speaking on “Aluminum Wars” at the research Seminar of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University on Friday, April 26th. All seminars are held at 12 noon in the Academy’s Ewell Sale Stewart Library & Archives unless otherwise noted. These technical seminars are intended for scientists and college-level students. Guests from other research and higher education institutions and organizations are encouraged to attend.
The talk is based on Dr. Sheller’s forthcoming book Aluminum Dreams: Lightness, Speed, Modernity (MIT Press, 2014). This chapter concerns the ways in which aluminum was crucial to warfare, but also how the contemporary culture of innovation and entrepreneurship remains deeply entwined with the military-industrial complex, with serious implications for our ability to address ethical issues concerning global pollution, environmental destruction, and the huge impacts of aluminum production on marginalized people.
For more information please contact: mimi.sheller@drexel.edu
Federico Finchelstein, Associate Professor of History, LANG & NSSR
Director of the Janey Program in Latin American Studies
Alcoa Advertisement, Holiday Magazine, 1943
Mimi Sheller, Drexel University
“Aluminum Dreams and the Making of Mobile Modernities”
Victoria Crespo, Colegio de México
“Old and New Forms of Dictatorships in Latin America”
Evan Daniel, Cuny Queens College
“Rolling for the Revolution: A Transnational History of Cuban Cigar Makers in Havana,
Florida, and New York City, 1850s-1890s”
Moderator: Louise Walker, Assistant Professor of History, NSSR
3:00-3:15 Coffee Break
Melissa Amezcua Yepiz, Sociology NSSR
Katie Detwiler, Anthropology NSSR
Alberto Fernández, Politics NSSR
Nicolás Figueroa, Sociology NSSR
Luis Herrán, Politics and Historical Studies NSSR
Gema Santamaría, Sociology and Historical Studies NSSR
Moderator: Christian Proaño, Assistant Professor of Economics, NSSR
Javier Auyero, University of Texas at Austin
“A Political Ethnographer’s Sinuous Road”
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Alcoa Ad 1927
Sputnik
On Tuesday, 2 March 2010, Mimi Sheller will be speaking on ‘Aluminum Dreams’ at Ignite Philly – part of Global Ignite Week. Johnny Brendas 1201 Frankford Avenue, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Come hear about dreams of lightness, speed, and modernity, plus the social and environmental costs of aluminum smelting and bauxite mining around the world — from the Jamaican tropics to the Icelandic tundra.
James L. Bingham, 1954 Alcoa ad, Holiday Magazine
On Wednesday, December 2nd, Mimi Sheller will be giving the paper “Space Age Tropics” at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, at the Marriott Hotel in Philadelphia, where she will also be a discussant for a double session on “Theorizing (im)mobilities: Anthropological takes on an emerging metanarrative”, organized by Noel B. Salazar (University of Leuven). This paper, also recently presented at Bucknell University, is drawn from a larger book-in-progress, Aluminum Dreams, about this versatile, ubiquitous material that is all around us all the time, but that seems almost invisible because it has become literally part of the furniture. The surprising story of aluminum – in our cars, power-lines, skyscrapers, airplanes, pots and pans, cosmetics, furniture, satellites and bombs – encapsulates the making of global modernity, the creation of multinational corporations, the modernization of warfare, the invention of suburbia and the making of the American Dream, as well as many other dreams of modernization around the world. In addition to transforming the built environment and the infrastructures for mobility, the material culture of aluminum also influenced the ideas, beliefs and meanings attached to movement in the 20th century. Aluminum put the world in motion and those new practices of mobility generated visual representations and symbolic economies revolving around the aesthetics of aerodynamic speed, accelerated mobility, and modernist technological futurism. At the same time, however, it also required control over the mining of bauxite from the Caribbean and the circulation of advertising imagery that placed the Caribbean outside of modernity. The pictured Alcoa promotion of Caribbean cruises in 1954 is a depiction of a Vodou-inspired Haitian musical performance by the graphic illustrator James Bingham. The same ships that carried bauxite out of the Caribbean also carried tourists into the Caribbean, suggesting the complex interweaving of different kinds of (im)mobilities.
