Table of Contents

Prologue: Finding Shoddy
Old Clothes Odyssey
The Heap
Act I: Devil’s Dust
Emergence of an Industry
Narratives of Transmutation, Myths of Invention
Devil’s Dust Politics
Material Philosophy and the Shredded Self
Shoddy as Paradox and Marx’s “Excrements of Consumption”
Act II: Textile Skin The Wear of War
Textile Skin and “the Sinews of War”
Shoddy and the Body Politic
Photography and the “Harvest of Death”
On Shrouds and Shoddy
Act III: Lively Things Miasma and Contagion
Consolidation of Clothes and Corpses
Disinfection and Its Discontents
The Intimate Materiality of the Unknowable
Liveliness and Formlessness
Epilogue: Shoddy Renaissance
  Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index

About the Author

Hanna Rose Shell is associate professor in the Department of Art & Art History, the Department of Cinema Studies & Moving Image Arts, and the History Department at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the author, most recently, of Hide and Seek: Camouflage, Photography, and the Media of Reconnaissance and a director of the film Secondhand [Pepe].

Reviews

"Shoddy is that rare book that takes you from the direct experiences you share with the author (what to do with your used clothes? the feeling of 'doing good' when you donate them to clothe someone 'less fortunate') to the larger social, economic, historical, and yes, moral universe in which those experiences live. Shell brings gives us this kind of journey by searching for shoddy. Through her we learn about the human costs of the industrial revolution, learn about British Chartism, the economic realities of the American Civil War, learn about the ideas that animated dissent--Carlyle, Disraeli, and Marx, just for a start, and so much more, all through the eyes of shoddy. It is an exemplary book in its use of the visual record to weave a narrative that implicates current practice, not just in how we do scholarship across a range of fields in media and science and technology studies, but how we think about ourselves. Shoddy is a book that will change your mind."

--Sherry Turkle, author of Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age