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Parasitical Sublimity

Parasitical Sublimity

 

Tenant of Culture shares some thoughts on mud-coats, patina and authenticity

 

1

This video is a research project conducted in the north of Friesland, a part of the Netherlands that my family is from. In autumn the soil gets incredibly muddy. This mud is as soft as silk and has the consistency of thick yoghurt. I’ve never encountered this type of soft mud anywhere else. At this point, plodding through the fields in September, when the mud is at its wettest, I started to think of it as an archive without a selection process. During these walks I would find all sorts of things stored in it; animal bones, wrappers, sea shells, a pair of scissors, gloves, a fork, a single wellington. All of these were covered in a thin layer of mud, giving them a uniformity in colour and texture. This system of the inclusion of objects, whether organic or manufactured, valuable or worthless, being encapsulated and stored inside the mud seemed to me to be very hospitable. The process of objects being included and excluded from other kinds of archives is based on a selection process of value assessment, but here in this muddy field the objects were sucked in, stored and protected.

 

2

Mud-coated jumper. Friesland, 2017

 

The history of Friesland is muddy. Being underneath sea level its inhabitants have had to grapple with living on drenched soil since the beginning of time. The ground was too soggy for carriages or horses and by foot it was difficult to get around. The side of my family that is from this region attributes this to an absence of religion in the family: missionaries weren’t able to make it far into this muddy place, allowing for paganism to flourish whilst the rest of the country converted to Christianity. When the Roman army came to conquer the Netherlands, one of its commandants Plinius the Old notes that he couldn’t distinguish whether they were on land or at sea. He couldn’t tell whether the houses the Frisians inhabited were shipwrecks or farms. He believed it was pointless to attempt to take over this region as its people were more fish than human.1

 

3

A mannequin wearing the working garments of a ‘dolster’ from Wierum or Moddergat, front and back. The images were taken during an exhibition on regional dress in 1898. Photographer: H. Bickhoff. Collection Nederlands Openluchtmuseum

 

In the very North of Friesland, on the coast of the North Sea, there is a town called Moddergat. In English, this translates as Mudhole. In the 19th century, the main source of income for this town was fishing, a task carried out by men. The women of the village would remain on land to roam the mudflats for worms that were used as bait. They wore thigh high leather boots, into which they tucked a generously cut pair of under trousers. Their skirts were rolled up and attached to a bodice and jacket. My father once lost a pair of wellies in these same mudflats as he got stuck in the succulent earth. The only way to escape was to leave his boots behind. He emerged from the mudflats wearing only slushy socks, stinking of sulfate.

 

4

 PRPS Barracuda Straight Leg jeans

 

The idea of mud as a decorative layer became a topic of discussion in 2017 when clothing firm Nordstrom released the PRPS Barracuda Straight Leg jeans. These were newly manufactured and coated in mud, all for the modest price of $425. The company branded the apparel as a pair of jeans “that shows you’re not afraid to get down and dirty”, directly appropriating the work class ethics of manual labour, laying bare the ambiguous relationship between luxury fashion, industrial production and class hierarchies. This particular pair of jeans became a turning point in the public perception of the pre-existing market of artificially stained and distressed clothing. In his essay Authenticity is a Con Professor Andrew Potter discusses the question why exactly this pair sparked such controversy when the:

 

PRSP jeans have been around for years, available in a wide range of pre stressed, aged, worn, washed and generally beat up styles, all retailing for well north of US$250. PRSP has long been held up as the acme of denim clad working class authenticity. Made in Japan on 1960s-era looms, using organically grown cotton sourced from Africa, the label owner once said he was inspired by the denim work by actual workers before jeans became middle class leisure wear.2

 

5

In his well known and often referenced Theory of the Leisure Class, Thorstein Veblen makes a similar observation regarding the stylistic appropriation of manual labour by the upper classes or ‘leisure class’. He observes that in order to successfully convey status one has to simulate the veneer of labour, denoting usefulness. In the 19th century these activities were were hunting or learning obscure languages. For women this included dressing as milkmaids and spending time in follies of mock-dairy farms. But these activities were always the sterilised version of the actual labour appropriated, to demark a clear distinction between the clean and the dirty.

 

[…] there are few of the better class who are not possessed of an instinctive repugnance for the vulgar forms of labour. We have a realising sense of ceremonial uncleanness attaching in a special degree to the occupations which are associated in our habits of thought with menial service. It is felt by all persons of refined taste that a spiritual contamination is inseparable from certain offices that are conventionally required of servants. Vulgar surroundings, mean (that is to say, inexpensive) habitations, and vulgarly productive occupations are unhesitatingly condemned and avoided. They are incompatible with life on a satisfactory spiritual plane – with ‘high thinking’. From the days of the Greek philosophers to the present, a degree of leisure and of exemption from contact with such industrial processes as serve the immediate everyday purpose of human life has ever been recognised by thoughtful men as the prerequisite to a worthy or beautiful, or even blameless, human life. In itself and in its consequences the life of leisure is beautiful and ennobling in all civilised men’s eyes.3

 

6

Artificial ageing has been common practice since the ancient Romans began to produce “weathered” copies of Greek art. In the Renaissance patina began to be used on new sculpture. Then, in the 17th century, paintings were artificially aged using varnish and other techniques and put in decrepit frames to further the effect, often to the advantage of forgers. By the 18th century a common view among art connoisseurs was that time made a picture more beautiful. In the 19th century the effect of age was particularly valued in works of art and architecture – the British critic John Ruskin was the most famous exponent of this aesthetic. “Fortunately for mankind” he wrote:

 

as some counterbalance to that wretched love of novelty…which especially characterises all vulgar minds, there is set in the deeper places of the heart such affection for the signs of age that the eye is delighted even by injuries which are the work of time. The greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is in its Age…it is in the golden stain of time that we are to look for the real light, and color, and preciousness of architecture.4

 

He had little to say, however, about the signs of age in paintings, except to commend “the golden tone that time has left”. Even as he praised the beauty of age in old buildings, he was sternly critical of any artist who made such effects the focus of their painting. This “picturesqueness” Ruskin attacked as “parasitical sublimity”, a sublimity “not inherent in the nature of the thing, but caused by something external to it.”5

 

7

 Images from essay Vettese Forster, S., Christie, R.M., (2013). The significance of the introduction of synthetic dyes in the mid 19th century on the democratisation of western fashion. JAIC Journal of the International Colour Association 11

 

Within fashion production the practice of artificially forged signs of age and wear and tear came to fruition most evidently halfway through the 19th century when synthetic textile dyes were invented:

 

These democratic changes were observed most significantly at a time coinciding with the discovery in 1856 of Mauveine, the first industrially-produced synthetic textile dye, and the consequent popularity of fashionable dress dyed in the mauve colour that this dye provided. Within a relatively short period of time, a range of so called aniline dyes had been discovered and introduced, providing access to a much wider range of bright colours for textiles. Newly created fashions in women’s wear, using the colours of these dyes, in various forms and of varying qualities, became more and more accessible to a wider population, and this led to the beginning of overlapping social class attitudes in the context of women’s fashion. […] The emergence of ‘democratic fashion’ was followed in time by a movement against the bright colours with which it was originally associated, in a movement akin to cyclical modern fashion trends. It was noted, for example in fashion magazines, that the synthetic brights had become popular in the dress of the lower classes and were used in garments of ‘inferior quality’. Godeys in 1872 stated, “Unmixed colours and all high colours, such as bright crimson, scarlet,clear blue and green have disappeared from choice goods and are only found in cheap materials made for the millions.” (…) The colours that became fashionable from around the late 1860’s were duller ones. It has been noted that ‘antique’ and ‘exotic’ effects were frequently sought after and the most desirable colours were described as ‘old-looking’, ‘strange’ or ‘indescribable tints’. Colours such as blacks, greys, ‘drabs’, ‘modes’ and unspecified browns and blues remained popular throughout that period.5

 

 

  1. Pye, Michael (2014). The Edge of the World. London: Penguin Books.
  2. Potter, Andrew (2012). Authenticity is a Con. Vestoj Issue 8.
  3. Veblen, Thorstein (2007). Theory of the Leisure Class. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published in 1899.
  4. Haxthausen, W., Charles (2012). “Abstract with Memories”: Klee’s “Auratic” Pictures. Paul Klee: Philosophical Vision: From Nature to Art. Available here.
  5. Ibid.
  6. Vettese Forster, S., Christie, R.M (2013). The significance of the introduction of synthetic dyes in the mid 19th century on the democratisation of western fashion. JAIC Journal of the International Colour Association 11. Available here. 

by Tenant of Culture

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http://dust.bog.life

http://dust.bog.life/wp-content/themes/bog-dust

https://harpers.org/archive/2020/07/bogland-bog-of-allen-ireland-peat-bog-bord-na-mona/

https://endnotes.org.uk/issues/3/en/endnotes-a-rising-tide-lifts-all-boats

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAdlS2Hdw28

http://www.socialhousinghistory.uk/

https://permanentlymoved.libsyn.com/301-2025-all-art-is-dust-eventually

https://www.cameronsworld.net/

http://ratbehavior.org/PawPaintingRats.htm

http://www.richardtorry.com/

https://nerdrum.com/

https://sacredwicca.com/greenman

http://www.jayowens.me/dust.html

https://soundcloud.com/folklore_podcast

https://pasttenseblog.wordpress.com/category/rebel-history-calendar/

http://www.luddites200.org.uk/

http://www.luddites200.org.uk/documents/Luddites_doc.pdf

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/conservation/clothes-moth-research/understanding-clothes-moths/#:~:text=Seal%20them%20in%20plastic%20'freezer,target%20larvae%20is%20more%20difficult.

http://www.r-type.org/

http://www.theageofmammals.com/

https://sci-hub.tw/

We are occasionally meeting ladies attacked with oryalpelatous symptoms, indigestion, cough–now distinctly traceable to head-dresses containing green arsenical artificial flowers. A careful chemical analysis of one of these wreaths gives exactly as much arsenic as would kill 56 men, and a fair tarlatane dress would kill 1,500!

– ‘M.D.’ quoted in Green Go the Lasses, O!, published in Punch October 5th, 1861

At the top of Leonard Parry’s 1900 list of the risks and dangers of various occupations were those ‘accompanied by the generation and scattering of abnormal quantities of dust’. 

– from Dust by Carolyn Steedman, 2001

Discussing occupations ‘from the social, hygienic and medical points of view’ in 1916, Thomas Oliver urged his readers to remember ‘that the greatest enemy of a worker in any trade is dust’

– from Dust by Carolyn Steedman, 2001

Leather workers and medical commentators also knew that the processes of fellmongering, washing, limescrubbing, scrapping, further washing, chemical curing, stretching, drying and dressing all gave rise to dust, which was inhaled. 

– from Dust by Carolyn Steedman, 2001

By the 1920s it was common knowledge that among workers in wool, hides and hair that it was the anthrax spore that constituted the greatest danger.

– from Dust by Carolyn Steedman, 2001

…the sweeps, dustmen, scavengers, &c., are paid (and often large sums) for the removal of the refuse they collect; whereas the bone-grubbers, and mud-larks, and pure-finders, and dredgemen, and sewer-hunters, get their pains only the value of the articles they gather.

– from London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, 1851

The bone-picker and rag-gatherer may be known at once by the greasy back which he carries on his back. Usually he has a stick in his hand, and this is armed with a spike or a hook, for the purpose of more easily turning over the heaps of ashes or dirt that are thrown out of the houses, and discovering whether they contain anything that is saleable at the rag-and-bottle or marine-store shop.

– from London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, 1851

It is dangerous to venture far into any of the smaller sewers branching off from the main, for in this the ‘hunters’ have to stoop low down in order to proceed; and, from the confined space, there are often accumulated in such places, large quantities of foul air, which, as one of them stated, will ‘cause instantaneous death’.

– from London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, 1851

‘Bless your heart the smell’s nothink; it’s a roughish smell at first, but nothink so bad as you thinks, ‘cause, you see, there’s sich lots o’ water always a coming down the sewer, and the air gits in from the gratings, and that helps to sweeten it a bit. There’s some places, ‘specially in the old sewers, where they say there’s foul air, and they tells me the foul air ‘ill cause instantaneous death, but I niver met with anythink of the kind, and I think if there was sich a thing I should know somethink about it, for I’ve worked the sewers, off and on, for twenty year.’

– sewer ‘Tosher’ quoted in London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, 1851

Some notion of the vast amount of this refuse annually produced in London may be formed from the fact that the consumption of coal in the metropolis is, according to the official returns, 3,500,000 tons per annum, which is at the rate of little more than 11 tons per house; the poorer families, it is true, do not burn more than 2 tons in the course of the year, but then many such families reside in the same house, and hence the average will appear in no way excessive.

– from London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, 1851

A dust-heap, therefore, may be briefly said to be composed of the following things, which are severally applied to the following uses:

  1. ‘Soil’, or fine dust, sold to brickmakers, for burning bricks, and to farmers for manure, especially for clover.
  2. ‘Brieze’, or cinders, sold to brickmakers, for burning bricks.
  3. Rags, bones and old metal, sold to marine-store dealers.
  4. Old tin and iron vessels, sold for ‘clamps’ to trunks, &c., and for making copperas.
  5. Old bricks and oyster shells, sold to builders, for sinking foundations, and forming roads.
  6. Old boots and shoes, sold to Prussian-blue manufacturers.
  7. Money and jewellery, kept, or sold

– from London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, 1851

A visit to any of the large dust-yards is far from uninteresting. Near the centre of the yard rises the highest heap, composed of what is called the ‘soil’, or finer portion of the dust used for manure. Around this heap are numerous lesser heaps, consisting of the mixed dust and rubbish carted in and shot down previous to sifting. Among these heaps are many women and old men with sieves made of iron, all busily engaged in separating the ‘brieze’ from the ‘soil’. There is likewise another large heap in some other part of the yard, composed of the cinders or ‘brieze ‘waiting to be shipped off to the brickfields. 

– from London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, 1851

The whole yard seems alive, some sifting and others shovelling the sifted soil on to the heap, while every now and then the dustcarts return to discharge their loads, and proceed again on their rounds for a fresh supply. Cocks and hens keep up a continual scratching and cackling among the heaps, and numerous pigs seem to find a great delight in rooting incessantly about after the garbage and eiffel collected from the houses and markets.

– from London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, 1851

The chimney sweepers are generally fond of drink; indeed their calling, like that of the dustmen, is one of those which naturally lead to it. The men declare they are ordered to drink gin and smoke as much as they can, in order to rid the stomach of the soot they may have swallowed during their work.

– from London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, 1851

 In one of the reports of the Board of Health, out of 4,312 deaths among males, of the age of 15 and upwards, the mortality among the sweepers, masters and men, was 9, or one in 109 of the whole trade…Many of these men still suffer, I am told, from the chimney-sweeper’s cancer [cancer of the testicles or scrotum], which is said to arise mainly from uncleanly habits. Some sweepers assure me they have vomited balls of soot.

– from London Labour and the London Poor by Henry Mayhew, 1851

But I will infer, that if this goodly City justly challenges what is her due, and merits all that can be said to reinforce his Praises, and give her Title; she is to be relieved from that which renders her less healthy, really offends her, and which darkens and eclipses all her other Attributes. And what is all this, but that Hellish and dismal Cloud of SEA-COALE? Which is not onely perpetual imminent over her head

– from Fumifugium by John Evelyn, 1661

But so universally mixed with the otherwise wholesome and excellent Aer, that her Inhabitants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist, accompanied by a fuliginous and filthy vapour, which renders them obnoxious to a thousand inconveniences, corrupting the Lungs, and disordering the entire habit of their Bodies; so that Catharrs, Phthisicks, Coughs and Consumptions, rage more in this one City, than the whole Earth besides.

– from Fumifugium by John Evelyn, 1661

Whilst these are belching it for their sooty jaws, the City of London resembles the face of Mount Aetna, the Court of Vulcan, Stromboli, or the Suburbs of Hell, than an Assembly of Rational Creatures, and the imperial seat of our incomparable Monarch. For when in all other places the Aer is most Serene and Pure, it is here Eclipsed with such a Cloud of Sulphure, as the Sun itself, which gives day to all the World besides, is hardly able to penetrate and impart it here; and the weary Traveller, at many Miles distance, sooner smells, than sees the City to which he repairs. 

– from Fumifugium by John Evelyn, 1661

This is that pernicious Smoake which sullyes all her Glory, superinducing a sooty Crust or Fur upon all that is lights, spoiling the moveables, tarnishing the Plate, Gildings and Furniture, and corroding the very Iron-bars and hardest Stones with those piercing and acrimonious Spirits which accompany its Sulphure; and executing more in one year, than exposed to the pure Aer of the Country it could effect in some hundreds.

– from Fumifugium by John Evelyn, 1661

So far from the smoke of London being offensive to me, it has always been to my imagination the sublime canopy that shrouds the City of the World. Drifted by the wind or hanging in gloomy grandeur over the vastness of our Babylon, the sight of it always filled my mind with feelings of energy such as no other spectacle could inspire. 

– from the Autobiography and Journal of B.R. Haydon, edited by Tom Taylor. Written about 1800-41, published 1847

The work-people, little remarkable for olfactory refinement, instead of thanking their master for his humane attention to their comfort and health, made a formal complaint to him, that the ventilator had increased their appetites, and therefore entitled them to a corresponding increase of wages!…But the master made an ingenious compromise with his servants; by stopping the fan during half the day, he adjusted the ventilation and the voracity of his establishment to a medium standard, after which he heard no complaint either on the score of health or appetite.

– from The Philosophy of Manufactures by Andrew Ure M.D., 1835

The mills! Oh the fetid, fuzzy, ill-ventilated mills! And in Shap’s cyclopean smithy do you remember the poor ‘grinders’ sitting underground in a damp dark place, some dozen of them, over their screeching stone cylinders, from every cylinder a sheet of yellow fire issuing, the principal light of the place? And the men, I was told, and they themselves know it, and ‘did not mind it,’ were all or mostly killed before their time, their lungs being ruined by the metal and stone dust! Those poor fellows, in their paper caps with their roaring gindstones, and their yellow oriflammes of fire, all grinding themselves so quietly to death, will never go out of my memory. 

– from a letter of Thomas Carlyle to Jane Welsh Carlyle, quoted in Thomas Carlyle, a History of His Life in London, by J.A. Froude, 1884

…a city of Dis (Dante’s) – clouds of smoke – the damned etc – coal barges – coaly waters, cast-iron Duke, etc – its marks are left on you…

– from Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent by Herman Melville, edited by Eleanor Melville Metcalf, 1949

As I walked restless and despondent through the gloomy city, 

And saw the eager unresting to and fro – as of ghosts in some sulphurous Hades–

And saw the crowds of tall chimneys going up, and the pall of smoke covering the sun, covering the earth, lying heavy against the very ground –

And saw the huge refuse-heaps writhing with children picking them over,

And the ghastly half-roofless smoke-blackened houses, and the black river flowing below,–

As I saw these, and as I saw again far away the Capitalist quarter,

With its villa residences and its high-walled gardens and its well-appointed carriages, and its face turned away from the wriggling poverty which made it rich,–

As I saw and remembered its drawing-room airs and affections and its wheezy pursy Church-going and its gas-reeking heavy-furnished rooms and its scent-bottles and its other abominations –

I shuddered:

For I felt stifled, like one who lies half-conscious – knowing not clearly the shape of the evil – in the grasp of some heavy nightmare.

– from Towards Democracy by Edward Carpenter, 1883

Now as to the Grandour of London, Would not England be easier and perhaps stronger if these vitals were more equally dispersed? Is there not a Tumour in that place, and too much matter for mutiny and Terrour to the Government if it should Burst? Is there not too much of our capital in one stake, liable to the Ravage of Plague and fire? Does not the Assembly too much increase Mortality and lessen Births, and the Church-yards become Infectious? Will not the Resort of the Wealthy and emulation to Luxury, melt down the order of Superiors among and bring all towards Levelling and Republican?

– from a letter of Robert Southwell to Sir William Petty, published in the Petty-Southwell Correspondence, edited by the Marquis of Lansdowne, 1928

Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes – gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun.  

– from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, 1853

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutants of a great (and dirty) city.  

– from Bleak House by Charles Dickens, 1853

The life here, like the atmosphere here, is bad for the weak, for the frail, for one who seeks a prop outside himself, for one who seeks cordiality, sympathy, attention; the moral lungs here must be as strong as the physical lungs, whose task is to get rid of the sulphuric acid in the smoky fog. The masses are saved by their struggle for daily bread, the commercial classes by their absorption in heaping up wealth, and all by the fuss and hurry of business; but nervous and romantic temperaments, fond of living among their fellows, of intellectual sloth and emotional idleness, are bored to death and fall into despair.

– from the Memoirs of Alexander Herzen, translated by Constance Garnett, 1924-27

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,

Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,

And mark in every face I meet

Marks of weakness, markes of woe.

 

In every cry of every Man,

In every Infant’s cry of fear,

In every voice, in every ban, 

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

 

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry

Every black’ning Church appalls;

And the hapless Soldier’s sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls.

 

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot’s curse

Blasts the new born Infant’s tear,

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

– ‘London’, from Songs of Experience by William Blake, 1794

On arriving near the top of this road, I obtained a distinct view of a phenomenon which can be seen no where in the world but at this distance from London. The Smoke of nearly a million of coal fires, issuing from the two hundred thousand houses which compose London and its vicinity, had been carried in a compact mass in the direction which lay at a right angle from my station. Half a million chimneys, each vomiting a bushel of smoke per second, had been disgorging themselves for at least six hours of the passing day, and they now produced a sombre tinge, which filled an angle of the horizon equal to 70degrees, or in bulk twenty-five miles long, by two miles high….

– from A Morning’s Walk from London to Kew by Sir Richard Phillips, 1817, originally published in parts 1813-16

In London this smoke is found to blight or destroy all vegetation…Other phenomena are produced by its union with fogs, rendering them nearly opaque, and shutting out the light of the sun; it blackens the mud of the streets by its deposit of tar, while the unctuous mixture renders the foot-pavement slippery; and it produces a solemn gloom whenever a sudden change of wind returns over the town the volume that was previously on its passage into the country. 

– from A Morning’s Walk from London to Kew by Sir Richard Phillips, 1817, originally published in parts 1813-16

Margiela’s re-use of contemporary “rubbish” such as broken shards and plastic carrier bags marks him out as a kind of “Golden Dustman” of the fashion world, converting base material into gold. The transformation of dust to gold is not just fanciful but has historical antecedents. Henry Dodd, a nineteenth-century owner of a great dust-yard in Islington, London, known to Dickens and a possible prototype for Boffin, the Golden Dustman, is said to have given his daughter a wedding gift of a single dust-heap, which afterwards fetched £10,000. 

– Caroline Evans, The Golden Dustman: A critical evaluation of the work of Martin Margiela and a review of Martin Margiela Exhibition (9/4/1615) in Fashion Theory Volume 2, Issue 1 (1998)

For centuries now, ever since the industrial age or maybe even before, it has always been a world of the intellect, reasoning, the machine. Here women were stuck with having tremendous powers of intuition experiencing other levels of reality and other realities yet they had to sit on it because men would say, well, you’re crazy. 

– from O.K. Momma, Who the Hell Am I?, Gloria E. Anzaldua in conversation with Luisah Teish, published in From This Bridge Called My Back, Writings by Radical Women of Color, 1981

Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned; we can sit in our safe corners mute as bottles, and we will still be no less afraid.

– from The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action by Audre Lorde, published in I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde edited by Rudolph P. Byrd, Johnnetta Betsch Cole & Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 2009

Men on our street who worked in the coal mines came home covered in a thin layer of grayish white dust that looked like ash. Women looked at them and talked about how they made the only really good money a working black man could make. No one talked of the dangers; it was the money that mattered.

– from Where We Stand: Class Matters by Bell Hooks, 2000

And since you are talking about factories and industries, do you not see the tremendous factory hysterically spitting out its cinders in the heart of our forests or deep in the bush, the factory for the production of lackeys; do you not see the prodigious mechanization, the mechanization of man; the gigantic rape of everything intimate, undamaged, undefiled that, despoiled as we are, our human spirit has still managed to the machine, yes, have you never seen it, the machine for crushing, for grinding, for degrading peoples? So that the danger is immense.

– from Discourse on Colonialism by Aimé Césaire, translated by Joan Pinkham, 2000, originally published in 1950

About the year 1863, Van mohair, the goat of the fleece inhabiting the Van district in Asia Minor, was introduced as a textile fabric, and from that time it is said the cases [of anthrax poisoning] become more numerous. This material came to be looked upon by the sorters as specially dangerous, so much so that some of them refused to work it; and a custom arose at certain of the mills for these employés to determine amongst themselves by drawing lots which of them should work upon it, or upon such of it as was regarded with any special apprehension.

– from Mr John Spear’s report to the local government board upon the so called “Woolsorters’ Disease” as observed at Bradford and in neighbouring districts in the west Riding of Yorkshire, 1881