In Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas (Duke UP, 2022) (Duke UP, 2023), 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.
Joseph C. Russo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University.
Armanc Yildiz is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University. He received his Ph.D. in Social Anthropology at Harvard University, with a secondary degree in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. He is also the founder of Academics Write, where he supports scholars in their writing projects as a writing coach and developmental editor.
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Franz Rickaby, et al., “Pinery Boys: Songs and Songcatching in the Lumberjack Era” (U Wisconsin Press, 2017)
David Hopkin, “Voices of the People in Nineteenth-Century France” (Cambridge UP, 2017)
Jason Josephson-Storm, “The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences” (U. Chicago, 2017)
Luisa Del Giudice, ed. “On Second Thought: Learned Women Reflect on Profession, Community, and Purpose” (U. Utah Press, 2017)
Ian Brodie, “A Vulgar Art: A New Approach to Stand-Up Comedy” (UP of Mississippi, 2014).
Michael Youngblood, “Cultivating Community: Interest, Identity, and Ambiguity in an Indian Social Mobilization” (South Asian Studies Press, 2016)
Yuval Harari, “Jewish Magic before the Rise of Kabbalah” (Wayne State UP, 2017)
Laura J. Olson and Svetlana Adonyeva, “The Worlds of Russian Village Women: Tradition, Transgression, Compromise” (U. Wisconsin Press, 2013)
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Rebecca Williams, “Muhammad and the Supernatural: Medieval Arab Views” (Routledge, 2013)
Kristin Andrews, “Do Apes Read Minds?: Toward a New Folk Psychology” (MIT Press, 2012)
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