I Can't Breathe, 2020: The Arts and Sciences of Oxygen

"I Can't Breathe, 2020: The Arts and Sciences of Oxygen" proposes a literary criticism responsive to the existential crises of our time, working at the intersection of the linguistic, the physiological, and the atmospheric. Bringing together disciplines usually kept apart, this crisis-responsive genre remaps the input networks of literature, highlighting human agency on opposing ends of the spectrum. Both senses of the anthropogenic are at work here. Human causation is harm-mitigating as well as harm-bearing. Native American literature and pandemic responses provide a compelling archive for this approach. Often discussed only in terms of harm, this body of evidence in fact also shows harm partly alleviated, suggesting that reparative agency is possible, and that diversifying our investigative lens might be one way to begin. Joy Harjo–poet, musician, and former premed major–is a salient test case. "For Alva Benson" and "Ah, Ah," like her blog posts, and like her saxophone playing, dwell on the respiratory chemistry of the human body as our precarious common ground. This chemistry integrates the arts and sciences of oxygen as physiological need, survival baseline, and expressive medium, speaking to the burden of the past, and holding out the perils and promise of the future.