Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas
In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of Southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke. His informants’ stories cover a wide swath of experiences, from histories of LGBTQ+ life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the Refinery Belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backward victims of circumstances. Russo demonstrates that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.
1141623247
Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas
In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of Southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke. His informants’ stories cover a wide swath of experiences, from histories of LGBTQ+ life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the Refinery Belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backward victims of circumstances. Russo demonstrates that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.
23.95 In Stock
Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas

Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas

by Joseph C. Russo
Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas
Add to Wishlist
Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas

Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas

by Joseph C. Russo

Overview

In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain Joseph C. Russo takes readers into the everyday lives of the rural residents of Southeast Texas. He encounters the region as a kind of world enveloped in on itself, existing under a pall of poverty, illness, and oil refinery smoke. His informants’ stories cover a wide swath of experiences, from histories of LGBTQ+ life and the local petrochemical industries to religiosity among health food store employees and the suffering of cancer patients living in the Refinery Belt. Russo frames their hard-luck stories as forms of verbal art and poetic narrative that render the region a mythopoetic landscape that epitomizes the impasse of American late capitalism. He shows that in this severe world, questions of politics and history are not cut and dry, and its denizens are not simply backward victims of circumstances. Russo demonstrates that by challenging classist stereotypes of rural Americans as passive, ignorant, and uneducated, his interlocutors offer significant insight into the contemporary United States.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781478023685
Publisher: Duke University Press
Publication date: 11/25/2022
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
Pages: 152
File size: 10 MB

About the Author

Joseph C. Russo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments  ix
Introduction  1
1. The Strange Time of Hard-Luck Stories  17
2. The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God  47
3. Queer Character and the Golden Triangle  76
4. Ringing Out  94
Notes  119
Bibliography  127
Index  135

What People are Saying About This

The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny - Susan Lepselter

“In this beautiful, funny, abject, brilliant book, Joseph C. Russo delves into Trump’s America from an ethnographic perspective, approaching worlds through granular attention to throwaway moments, embedded voicings, little stories, infusions of ruin and delusion, ways of performing what cannot be said, and how politics get braided into intimacy. Its characters are riveting, and Russo’s ethnographic ear is devastating and haunting. We need more work like this, work that enters into and tracks along in the intensities of a world that is both marginalized and at the center of America.”

The Hundreds - Kathleen Stewart

“Joseph C. Russo takes us to a world of composing and decomposing characters felt in the air, an ecology of stories ringing out in the suspension of an impasse. We pass over a threshold into a strange time of egrets, refineries, pool tables, flatlands, epiphanies, and cancer. Queer rurality accrues in morning coffee in a circle of lawn chairs at the trailer park. Politics is atmospheric. Texture has a life of its own. Life itself is a material trance.”

From the B&N Reads Blog
Page 1 of

Related Subjects

Social Sciences
Anthropology & Archaeology
Socio-Cultural Anthropology
Socio-Cultural Anthropology - General & Miscellaneous
Social Sciences
Anthropology & Archaeology
Socio-Cultural Anthropology
Socio-Cultural Anthropology - General & Miscellaneous

Customer Reviews