av福利社

A Space on the Side of the Road vividly evokes an 鈥渙ther鈥� America that survives precariously among the ruins of the West Virginia coal camps and 鈥渉ollers.鈥� To Kathleen Stewart, this particular 鈥渙ther鈥� 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 鈥渏ust settin鈥� 鈥� 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 鈥渏ust talk,鈥� Stewart propels us into the intensity of this nervous, surreal 鈥渟pace on the side of the road.鈥� 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 鈥減rogress.鈥�


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 鈥渙ccupied鈥� by schoolteachers, doctors, social workers, and other professionals representing an 鈥渙fficial鈥� 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 鈥淎merica.鈥�