Feeling Place: Documenting Affective Attachments in the Rust Belt and Fracking Fields

198 pagesOngoing crises resulting from deindustrialization and economic depression in Rust Belt communities have inspired a veritable explosion of documentary media that engage with the relationship between space, place, and subjectivity. In examining these media, I analyze the operations of documentary poetics, the discourses and figures with which these works engage, and their deployment of parataxis as a formal strategy. More specifically, I trace how such works use the figure of the roughneck, the aesthetic category of the pastoral, and patriotic symbols and imagery as they splice together various forms of media from documentary photography, testimony, and legal records to journalism. I argue that this strategic splicing is symptomatic of an attempt to represent the totality of crisis as an emplaced phenomenon despite the impossibility of doing so. As such, these works serve as discontinuous wholes, capable of containing resonance, dissonance, connection, and internal contradiction. Nostalgia serves as an important and recurring affect in this context, often fostering a desire for the recovery of lost ways of being and knowing by prompting a return to an idealized past. As such, works like Gasland, FrackNation, and “Truthland: Dispatches from the Real Gasland,” despite their starkly opposed views on natural gas drilling, ultimately present the same vision of the future—one bound to and limited by the unfulfilled but still realizable promises of recent history. In contrast, I examine other media, such as the hybrid documentary photography and poetry projects Shut Up Shut Down and Shale Play, which repurpose generic conventions in order to experiment with polyvocality and collage. In bringing these various media together, this dissertation aims to do something other than synthesize their content and construct a definitive narrative about the crises experienced by Rust Belt communities; instead, this project traces the limits and possibilities of the visions of the documentary media it analyzes by closely attending to how they represent and reimagine the relationships between space, place, and subjectivity. In doing so, this project demonstrates how these works become bound up in or illuminate possibilities for thinking out of the logics of neoliberalism and late capitalism.2024-09-0