Airborne Hospitality

This essay conceptualizes the neologism “airborne hospitality” to characterize animal-focused cinematic representations and visualization processes that collectively reimagine air as a transspecies community-building medium. It brings Jacques Derrida’s theorizations on hospitality into dialogue with literary and cultural interpretations of air to analyze human-avian caregiving and other vertically oriented practices of hospitable intimacies in Indian filmmaker Shaunak Sen’s 2022 documentary All That Breathes and to envision alternative emancipatory aesthetics in response to airborne toxicity.