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Poetry and Work“Because We Love Wrong”: Citizenship and Labour in Alena Hairston’s The Logan Topographies

Poetry and Work: “Because We Love Wrong”: Citizenship and Labour in Alena Hairston’s The Logan... [This chapter situates Alena Hairston’s The Logan Topographies (2007)—a book about Black coal mining communities that uses Logan, WV as a metonymy for wider cultural patterns—within a debate over the gendered distinction between labour and work identified by Hannah Arendt and expanded upon by M. NourbeSe Philip. Hairston’s book demonstrates the unjust pattern by which activities such as water-gathering, giving birth, and tending house, are cast as unproductive “labor” by patriarchal norms, in contrast to the way “work” is defined by material production; at the same time, men engage in brawling, liquor-drinking, and sexual promiscuity in ways that damage domestic space. More than simply documenting the unequal hierarchy within a Black community itself unjustly positioned within majority white American culture, Hairston offers one model for a transformation of the situation of women vis-à-vis labour and work: a creative reimagining of membership and citizenship in terms of “afference”; that is, a definition of love as reciprocity and dare. This chapter draws on Charles T. Lee’s notion of “ingenious citizenship” to suggest that The Logan Topographies is less a writing of place than a transformation of the ways place can be viewed, a movement from exclusive belonging to mutual responsibility.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

Poetry and Work“Because We Love Wrong”: Citizenship and Labour in Alena Hairston’s The Logan Topographies

Part of the Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Poetics Book Series
Editors: Walton, Jo Lindsay; Luker, Ed
Smith, Lytton
Poetry and Work — Nov 17, 2019
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16 pages

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Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
ISBN
978-3-030-26124-5
Pages
291 –307
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-26125-2_10
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[This chapter situates Alena Hairston’s The Logan Topographies (2007)—a book about Black coal mining communities that uses Logan, WV as a metonymy for wider cultural patterns—within a debate over the gendered distinction between labour and work identified by Hannah Arendt and expanded upon by M. NourbeSe Philip. Hairston’s book demonstrates the unjust pattern by which activities such as water-gathering, giving birth, and tending house, are cast as unproductive “labor” by patriarchal norms, in contrast to the way “work” is defined by material production; at the same time, men engage in brawling, liquor-drinking, and sexual promiscuity in ways that damage domestic space. More than simply documenting the unequal hierarchy within a Black community itself unjustly positioned within majority white American culture, Hairston offers one model for a transformation of the situation of women vis-à-vis labour and work: a creative reimagining of membership and citizenship in terms of “afference”; that is, a definition of love as reciprocity and dare. This chapter draws on Charles T. Lee’s notion of “ingenious citizenship” to suggest that The Logan Topographies is less a writing of place than a transformation of the ways place can be viewed, a movement from exclusive belonging to mutual responsibility.]

Published: Nov 17, 2019

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