A Space on the Side of the Road: Cultural Poetics in an "Other" America

by Stewart, Kathleen

• ISBN13: 9780691011035
• ISBN10: 0691011036
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1996-02-16
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr

Summary

A Space on the Side of the Roadvividly 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 inLet 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 Roadfinally bridges the gap between anthropology and cultural studies and provides us with a brilliant and challenging experiment in thinking and writing about "America."

Table of Contents

List of Photographs
Acknowledgments
Prologue	p. 3
The Space of Culture	p. 13
A Space of Critique	p. 20
"Subjects" and "Objects" in the Space of an Immanent Critique	p. 21
The Space of Story	p. 26
The Space on the Side of the Road	p. 32
An Ethnographic Space	p. 39
Mimetic Excess in an Occupied Place	p. 41
An "Other" America	p. 41
An Occupied Place	p. 42
The Hills as a Social Imaginary	p. 50
Being Caught	p. 53
The Spectacle of Impacts	p. 56
A Lost Homeland	p. 63
Unforgetting: The Anecdotal and the Accidental	p. 67
Unforgetting	p. 71
A Near Miss	p. 75
The Diacritics of Interruptions	p. 81
An Other Interruption, or an Interruption from the Other Side	p. 84
Chronotopes	p. 90
Roaming the Ruins	p. 90
The Shock of History	p. 97
Riley's Last Ride	p. 112
Mr. Henry's Sticks	p. 115
Encounters	p. 117
The Bourgeois Imaginary	p. 117
Spaces of Encounter	p. 119
Encountering Alterity	p. 125
The Sign of the Body	p. 128
Hollie Smith's Encounter	p. 135
Afterthought	p. 139
The Space of the Sign	p. 140
The Social Semiotics of Signs	p. 141
Signs of Sociality	p. 147
The Space of the Gap	p. 157
The Space of Performance	p. 159
A Visit(ation)	p. 162
The Accident	p. 165
A Visit(ation)	p. 169
A Postcard	p. 177
The Place of Ideals	p. 179
The Space of Mediation	p. 179
Claims and Counterclaims	p. 183
Ideals in the Space of Desire	p. 189
In the Realm of Negations	p. 194
Placing People	p. 201
A Space on the Side of the Road	p. 205
Notes	p. 213
Bibliography	p. 217
Index	p. 239
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