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

by Joseph C. Russo

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.

152 pages, Hardcover

Published January 3, 2023

Reviews

[Io Perl-Strahan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Subtle and thoughtful, the human is not lost along the way. Valuable to me as an example of ethnography that does not take itself too seriously but does takes its subjects seriously.

[风花 · Rating 5 out of 5]

作者在德州这种“保守主义”大本营做田野，他的写作显现了一种挣扎，当他的同行都觉得“你研究这些人有什么意义”的时候，作者反而以人类学家的温柔，试图反映“刻板印象里的保守主义德州”，以及这些“保守主义老白人”的复杂面向。“这些人如何被困在不能动弹的历史之中？” 并且因为作者是在16年前做的田野，反而为“川普主义在红州的史前史”提供了史料，在川普上台之前的保守主义大本营长什么样子？是什么造成了对川普的支持？（在川普上台之前关于各种deep state的阴谋论已经在流行）。同时这本也关注了德州的酷儿生活，“如果酷儿是个保守主义者？” 作者的民族志提供了一个不同于追求“解放、追求未来与能见”的酷儿的being状态。现实的酷儿政治是比“压迫-解放”的二元叙事更为复杂与缠绕的存在。 酷儿形象永远不是单一的，而是复数的。

甚至作者对德州人hard-luck story的研究，很容易让人联想到方慧蓉或郭于华对社会主义中国老百姓的”诉苦“研究。而德州人民的生活，居然显现出某种与“县城中国”人民生活相似性，例如作者对他田野下人们的“养生神学”/“排毒神学”的研究，人们如何喜爱“自然养生保健品”多于对正规医疗的信赖，德州人民如何反映出一种和县城养生法相似的“解毒阶段论”心态，“（P71）吃了某种保健品排毒之后，在彻底解毒之前，病症反而会加重，这是排毒必须要经过的阶段。”

[P. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joseph C. Russo excavates, though this analogy might be flawed given the intense relationships he has been able to build with the book’s subjects, the stories of South East Texan residents in the Beaumont and Vidor region. Stories that grapple with the socio-economic stuckness, impasse, of their environment. A stagnation caused by capital sending the region’s people to slaughter, waning infrastructure, social isolation - the exhaustive list of their plight would drive you crazy. He writes: “…it is the ongoing composition of place where the materialist-speculative boom-or-bust economy festers, and the intensity of these fluctuating conditions produce severe forms of life.” The region’s inhabitants are mired by this impasse, which Trump and the politically conservative sphere perversely latch on to. The people are in hopeless conditions with reasons to distrust industry, government, and medicine; yet still, they linger on their ability to shape the future. The paradox of the impasse - linear time progresses, the inahabitants age and grow sick while the environment remains too present - manifest itself through these stories and the characters that populate them. Stories of the harshness of their condition and their means of surviving through it, of managing the impasse. Stories which are beautifully littered with characters that sit in desolation at the slots machine, talk each other down from the ledge, and share in each other’s misery.

[Melos Han-Tani · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great collection of stories/research on communities in SE Texas, diving into peoples' relation to the government, health, religion, queerness, living in a place with a lot of pollution.

[Jacob · Rating 4 out of 5]

the focus on the stories made it feel def a little all over the place on the thematic front but the last two chapters served me. obviously amazing on the writing affect front. into the details rather than the throughline of the talk... felt like a mediated point but thank you kathleen stewart for shining through