A Space on the Side of the Road

By Kathleen Stewart

Book Overview

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."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691011036
• ISBN13: 9780691011035
• Release Date: February 1996
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 264 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.2" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

This book is excellent

Susan Lepselter's poetic account of the creation of meaning by a betrayed and disenfranchised community is truly mesmerizing, but may be too dense for those uninitiated in the rigmarole of social theory. Her work is actually quite accessible compared to other writers in the field, and so makes itself vulnerable by straddling two different markets, the academic and the quasi-popular. Still, the book is moving and very enjoyable to read, and I can't recommend it enough.

Brilliant and Challenging

Kathleen Stewart's book is not for everyone. Seemingly some people have even taken offense. Still, as a social scientist (I have a chair in organization studies), I cannot recommend this book highly enough, for it represents a critical avenue of development for writing social theory. Whether it presents the truth of the West Virginian experience I cannot say, as I've never visited the hollers she writes of (but I haven't seen a better analysis either, so I intend to believe her until somebody effectively disproves her), but I can state that she has found a way of writing about her experiences and communicating theory which is amazingly fresh and goes directly to the problem of developing critique in late modernity. I've rarely been moved to tears by a non-fiction book, but I wept while reading this -- tears of sheer joy of appreciating a brilliant mind. Should be required reading for all social scientists.

Unamerican Nightmares

In one of the most profoundly affecting social science books I have read, Kathleen Stewart adopts a radical and poetic language to summon up the inarticulacies of people in a world got down. In an environment surrounded by ghosts, lost hopes and debris from other times, the denizens of this space manufacture tales, phantasmogoric stories which conjure up powerful forces beyond their control. It is through these stories that they try to gain possession of their own lives and environment in a capitalist America which systematically disempowers and uses up people and resources.By avoiding leftist reified and conservative discourse, the impact of these forces on ordinary people is relayed in a humane and grounded fashion, devoid of meta-theoretical abstractions, which preserves their dignity and shares their insights. Kathleen's imaginative and empathetic approach cannot be too highly commended, for it is this which ultimately provokes an anger that working people should be treated with such disdain, by middle class academics as well as by capital.