ABOUT THIS BOOK
Bringing together media studies and environmental humanities, the contributors to Saturation develop saturation as a heuristic to analyze phenomena in which the elements involved are difficult or impossible to separate. In ordinary language, saturation describes the condition of being thoroughly soaked, while in chemistry it is the threshold at which something can be maximally dissolved or absorbed in a solution. Contributors to this collection expand notions of saturation beyond water to consider saturation in sound, infrastructure, media, Big Data, capitalism, and visual culture. Essays include analyses of the thresholds of HIV detectability in bloodwork, militarism's saturation of oceans, and the deleterious effects of the saturation of cellphone and wi-fi signals into the human body. By channeling saturation to explore the relationship between media, the environment, technology, capital, and the legacies of settler colonialism, Saturation illuminates how elements, the natural world, and anthropogenic infrastructures, politics, and processes exist in and through each other.

Contributors. Marija Cetinić, Jeff Diamanti, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Lisa Yin Han, Stefan Helmreich, Mél Hogan, Melody Jue, Rahul Mukherjee, Max Ritts, Rafico Ruiz, Bhaskar Sarkar, John Shiga, Avery Slater, Janet Walker, Joanna Zylinska

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking through Seawater, also published by Duke University Press.

Rafico Ruiz is currently the Associate Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture and the author of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier, also published by Duke University Press.

REVIEWS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments  ix
Thinking With Saturation Beyond Water: Thresholds, Phase Change, and the Precipitate / Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz  1
Water
1. The Colors of Saturated Seas / Stefan Helmreich  29
2. Hydromedia: From Water Literacy to the Ethics of Saturation / Joanna Zylinska  45
3. Fossil Fuels, Fossil Waters: Aquifers, Pipelines, and Indigenous Water Rights / Avery Slater  70
Thresholds
4. Sonic Saturation and Militarized Subjectivity in Cold War Submarine Films / John Shiga  105
5. Wireless Saturation / Rahul Mukherjee  123
6. Saturation as a Logic of Enclosure? / Max Ritts  144
Phase Change
7. Becoming Undetectable in the Chthulucene / Bishnupriya Ghosh  161
8. The Media of Seaweeds: Between Kelp Forest and Archive / Melody Jue  185
9. Drought Conditions: Desalination and Deep Climate Change in Southern California / Rafico Ruiz  205
Precipitate
10. Precipitates of the Deep Sea: Seismic Surveys and Sonic Saturation / Lisa Yin Han  223
11. Media Saturation and Southern Agencies / Bhaskar Sarkar  243
12. Oil Barrels: The Aesthetics of Saturation and the Blockage of Politics / Mariji Cetinić and Jeff Diamanti  264
13. The Data Center Industrial Complex / Mél Hogan  283
Afterword: Climate Change as Matter Out of Phase / Janet Walker  306
Contributors  313
Index  317

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