Jet Lag

by Lee, Christopher J.; Schaberg, Christopher; Bogost, Ian

• ISBN13: 9781501323225
• ISBN10: 1501323229
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2017-09-07
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic

Summary

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

What exactly is jet lag? And, more importantly, how do we live with jet lag? Christopher J. Lee's book introduces jet lag as an object of study, tracing medical, temporal, and technological approaches for understanding this strange, hidden cost of our populist cosmopolitanism today. Drawing upon personal experience and an array of cultural registers, Jet Lag considers this present-day Icarian experience to be an allegory of our intrinsic human limits in the face of modern technological change. Jet lag is revealed to be an unavoidable discomfort, an existential condition that is the result of the human body and its inner clock being pitched against the time-leaping effects of modern aviation technologies.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Author Biography

Christopher J. Lee is Lecturer at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. He is the editor of Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (2010), named a Choice Significant University Press Title for Undergraduates, 2010-2011, and author of Unreasonable Histories: Nativism, Multiracial Lives, and the Genealogical Imagination in British Africa (2014). His writing has appeared in Foreign Policy, Chronicle of Higher Education, Christian Science Monitor, Africa is a Country, The Point (Chicago), and the Mail & Guardian (South Africa).

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. The Esperanto of Jet Lag
Chapter 2. Mean Times
Chapter 3. Circadian Rhythm and Blues
Chapter 4. A Bourgeois Affliction? The Emancipation of the Passenger
Chapter 5. Fear of Flying – Jet Lag as a Way of Life
Index