Aluminum Dreams - 9780262026826

Aluminum shaped the twentieth century. It enabled high-speed travel andgravity-defying flight. It was the material of a streamlined aesthetic that came to representmodernity. And it became an essential ingredient in industrial and domestic products that rangedfrom airplanes and cars to designer chairs and artificial Christmas trees. It entered modern homesas packaging, foil, pots and pans and even infiltrated our bodies through food, medicine, andcosmetics. In Aluminum Dreams, Mimi Sheller describes how the materiality andmeaning of aluminum transformed modern life and continues to shape the world today.

Aluminum, Sheller tells us, changed mobility and mobilized modern life. Itenabled air power, the space age and moon landings. Yet, as Sheller makes clear, aluminum wasimportant not only in twentieth-century technology, innovation, architecture, and design but also inunderpinning global military power, uneven development, and crucial environmental and healthconcerns. Sheller describes aluminum's shiny utopia but also its dark side. The unintendedconsequences of aluminum's widespread use include struggles for sovereignty and resource control inAfrica, India, and the Caribbean; the unleashing of multinational corporations; and the pollution ofthe earth through mining and smelting (and the battle to save it). Using a single material as anentry point to understanding a global history of modernization and its implications for the future,Aluminum Dreams forces us to ask: How do we assemble the material culture ofmodernity and what are its environmental consequences?

AluminumDreams includes a generous selection of striking images of iconic aluminum designs, manyin color, drawn from advertisements by Alcoa, Bohn, Kaiser, and other major corporations, pamphlets,films, and exhibitions.