Struggling for breath

Ananda Devi’s Les Jours vivants (2013) is hauntingly prescient in tracing, against the backdrop of a city propelled ever forwards by cycles of production and consumption, striking contemporary connections between social division, isolation, and racialized violence. At the time of writing this article, the news has been dominated by the Covid-19 pandemic and by global responses to acts of racialized brutality during the summer of 2020. Reading Les Jours vivants with the specificities of urgent global issues in mind, this article draws attention to a sensory trope at the heart of contemporary experience: the life and the suffocation of breath. In the article, I follow the flow of air and breath through the city, between bodies, and on the borderlines of life and death in Les Jours vivants, as a means of disclosing the unequal power relations inherent in the struggle for breath as a defining feature of our living days.