Affective Critical Regionality

Reviews / Votes

Reaching across a diversity of writings Campbell brings the idea of the region into life in a newly human way, situating it amongst the variety of what makes up being alive. The text persistently inspires and enriches. He meshes the variety of key sources and with unusual clarity unpacks the idea of how affect works; the writing affective in itself. -- David Crouch, Emeritus Professor of Cultural Geography, University of Derby This book is a powerful intervention of a singular kind in the work of configuring possibilities for knowledge and action. It arrays the intensities and infusions of regionality across a vast arc of zones, genres and ways of being, catching up not the boundaries and traces of place but its unfolding, its alchemy, in difference, edging, agitations and intricate infrastructures of surprise. In Campbell's cartographic mapping, affective regionalities are made of knots, speeds, loops, gestures, sonorities and muscle. They whisper a minor language for remaking the world. -- Kathleen Stewart, Professor of Anthropology, University of Texas Like the concept of "regionality" itself, Campbell's prose, both in its theoretical brilliance and scintillating close readings of diverse texts, fractures the totalizing frame of regionalism with an affective intensity that is contagious as well as entirely persuasive. In addition to its many local insights, this book is remarkable for its re-imagining of the political possibilities of regionality "as an energized sense of care." A scintillating, ultimately humane achievement, Affective Critical Regionality further solidifies Campbell's status as a groundbreaking scholar not only of the U.S. West but also of critical regionalist studies more generally. -- Stephen Tatum, Professor of English, University of Utah, Author of In the Remington Moment