Ghassan Hage, editor

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: States of Decay / Ghassan Hage 1
1. Forever "Falling Apart": Semiotics and Rhetorics of Decay / Violeta Schubert 17
2. Trash and Treasure: Pathologies of Permanence on the Margins of Our Plastic Age / Debra McDougall 28
3. Infrastructure as Decay and the Decay of Infrastructure / Akhil Gupta 37
4. The Waterfall at the End of the World: Earthquakes, Entropy, and Explanation / Monica Minnegal, Michael Main, and Peter D. Dwyer 47
5. "Vile Corpse": Urban Decay as Human Beauty and Social Pollution / Michael Herzfeld 58
6. Decay or Fresh Contact? The Morality of Mixture after War's End / Bart Klem 73
7. Seeds of Decay / Fabio Mattioli 86
8. Discourses of Decay in Settler Colonial Australia / Elise Klein 99
9. Decay as Decline in Social Viability among Ex-Militiamen in Lebanon / Ghassan Hage 110
10. Relational Decay: White Helpers in Australia's Indigenous Communities / Cameo Dalley 128
11. Decay, Rot, Mold, and Resistance in the US Prison System / Tamara Kohn 140
References 153
Contributors 171
Index 175