Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas
Hard Luck and Heavy Rain: The Ecology of Stories in Southeast Texas
by Joseph C. Russo
Duke University Press, 2023 eISBN: 978-1-4780-2368-5 | Cloth: 978-1-4780-1641-0 | Paper: 978-1-4780-1905-3 Library of Congress Classification F391.2.R877 2022
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
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.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Joseph C. Russo is Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Wesleyan University.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. The Strange Time of Hard-Luck Stories 17 2. The Higher the Hair, the Closer to God 47 3. Queer Character and the Golden Triangle 76 4. Ringing Out 94 Notes 119 Bibliography 127 Index 135
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