Kathleen Stewart

DIVA creatively written ethnography tracking between intimate, everyday feeling and larger collective cultural forces in the contemporary U.S./div

Ordinary Affects

Lauren Berlant

The Hundreds--composed of pieces one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long--is Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart's collaborative experimental writing project in which they strive toward sensing and capturing the resonances that operate at the ordinary level of everyday experience.

The Hundreds

This text portrays an "other" America that survives among the ruins of the West Virginia coal camps and "hollers". It paints a picture of a fragmented and betrayed community, excluded from the narrative of capitalism, and occupied by professionals, representing official America.

Cultural Poetics in an "other" America

A Space on the Side of the Road

Andrew U. Frank

Edzer Pebesma

Matt Duckham

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Geographic Information Science, GIScience 2014, held in Vienna, Austria in September 2014. The 23 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from various submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections such as information visualization, spatial analysis, user-generated content, semantic models, wayfinding and navigation, spatial algorithms, and spatial relations.

8th International Conference, GIScience 2014, Vienna Austria, September 24-26, 2014, Proceedings

Geographic Information Science

Do you ever really know the man you love? When Rose? eighteen-year relationship ends in the most shocking and unexpected way, she emerges from years of what she thought was a loving relationship and realizes the extent to which she was being emotionally manipulated and controlled. While trying to pick up the threads of her shattered life, she meets a charming and elusive new man. He offers hope and possibilities for the future, but as Rose is drawn further into the labyrinth that is Gary? life, she starts to wonder if he is the man she thought he was. Compelling and darkly humorous, Men of Bad Character is a novel about modern love and dangerous liaisons.

Men of Bad Character

Eleanora has had a failed marriage and lives with her mother, a religious woman. They take in a house-boarder. All this is simple enough. Yet the past that slowly reveals itself is eating this family of sorts alive, and draws Eleanora to a room, and a place within herself which she may not survive.

The Red Room

Ordinary Affects is a singular argument for attention to the affective dimensions of everyday life and the potential that animates the ordinary. Known for her focus on the poetics and politics of language and landscape, the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart ponders how ordinary impacts create the subject as a capacity to affect and be affected. In a series of brief vignettes combining storytelling, close ethnographic detail, and critical analysis, Stewart relates the intensities and banalities of common experiences and strange encounters, half-spied scenes and the lingering resonance of passing events. While most of the instances rendered are from Stewart’s own life, she writes in the third person in order to reflect on how intimate experiences of emotion, the body, other people, and time inextricably link us to the outside world. Stewart refrains from positing an overarching system—whether it’s called globalization or neoliberalism or capitalism—to describe the ways that economic, political, and social forces shape individual lives. Instead, she begins with the disparate, fragmented, and seemingly inconsequential experiences of everyday life to bring attention to the ordinary as an integral site of cultural politics. Ordinary affect, she insists, is registered in its particularities, yet it connects people and creates common experiences that shape public feeling. Through this anecdotal history—one that poetically ponders the extremes of the ordinary and portrays the dense network of social and personal connections that constitute a life—Stewart asserts the necessity of attending to the fleeting and changeable aspects of existence in order to recognize the complex personal and social dynamics of the political world.

A Space on the Side of the Road vividly evokes an "other" America that survives precariously among the ruins of the West Virginia coal camps and "hollers." To Kathleen Stewart, this particular "other" exists as an excluded subtext to the American narrative of capitalism, modernization, materialism, and democracy. In towns like Amigo, Red Jacket, Helen, Odd, Viper, Decoy, and Twilight, men and women "just settin'" track a dense social imaginary through stories of traumas, apparitions, encounters, and eccentricities. Stewart explores how this rhythmic, dramatic, and complicated storytelling imbues everyday life in the hills and forms a cultural poetics. Alternating her own ruminations on language, culture, and politics with continuous accounts of "just talk," Stewart propels us into the intensity of this nervous, surreal "space on the side of the road." It is a space that gives us a glimpse into a breach in American society itself, where graveyards of junked cars and piles of other trashed objects endure along with the memories that haunt those who have been left behind by "progress." Like James Agee's portrayal of the poverty-stricken tenant farmers of the Depression South in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, this book uses both language and photographs to help readers encounter a fragmented and betrayed community, one "occupied" by schoolteachers, doctors, social workers, and other professionals representing an "official" America. Holding at bay any attempts at definitive, social scientific analysis, Stewart has concocted a new sort of ethnographic writing that conveys the immediacy, density, texture, and materiality of the coal camps. A Space on the Side of the Road finally bridges the gap between anthropology and cultural studies and provides us with a brilliant and challenging experiment in thinking and writing about "America."

Kathleen Stewart

About

Books

Join the club