Duke University Press The Hundreds

In The Hundreds Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart speculate on writing, affect, politics, and attention to processes of world-making. The experiment of the one hundred word constraint—each piece is one hundred or multiples of one hundred words long—amplifies the resonance of things that are happening in atmospheres, rhythms of encounter, and scenes that shift the social and conceptual ground. What's an encounter with anything once it's seen as an incitement to composition? What's a concept or a theory if they're no longer seen as a truth effect, but a training in absorption, attention, and framing? The Hundreds includes four indexes—by Andrew Causey, Susan Lepselter, Fred Moten, and Stephen Muecke—who respond with their own compositional, conceptual, and formal staging of the worlds of the book. Review "A speculative and seductive book. . . . The Hundreds asks us to pay attention to the capacious and crucial smallness of our everyday, to slow down and dial in to the richness and frustrations of ordinary encounters as a grounding and creative political practice."--Elisabeth R. Anker "Theory & Event" (7/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) "As compositions, the hundreds illuminate and obscure, defamiliarize and refamiliarize, reflect and refract (tip of the cap to Volosinov 1973) both their authors and the cultural artifacts that appear in them, and offer a way of archiving cultural moments in ways that acknowledge, even foreground, their affective power."--Seth Kahn "Anthropological Quarterly" (1/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) " The Hundreds, by cultural theorist Lauren Berlant and anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, is at once a bold thought experiment and a radical exploration of reflexive ethnographic writing. . . . The Hundreds is a must read for scholars interested in affect as another register of human experience that exists alongside the psychological and phenomenological."--Asha L. Abeyasekera "Feminism & Psychology" (1/1/2020 12:00:00 AM) " The Hundreds focalizes an intrinsic desire to explore the world's simplicities as the foundation for the potentiality of the extraordinary. Berlant and Stewart show that, indeed, ordinary life is ordinary and transformative, containing so many possibilities for thinking about who we are in the world, really."--Matt Morgenstern "Cleveland Review of Books" (2/3/2020 12:00:00 AM) " The Hundreds is playful and loose, it roams and discovers, only to drift elsewhere, but it works: it grounds theory, makes it real."--Casey Dawson and Christopher Schaberg "Los Angeles Review of Books" (12/1/2019 12:00:00 AM) "A roving adventure in critical prose. . . . Berlant and Stewart eschew a literary focal point for a broadly questioning spirit. . . . The point is not to 'track thing into their secret lairs, ' or to place them in the 'so-called big picture, ' rather, it is to look again, and encourage the reader look again too."--Michael Caines "TLS" (8/9/2019 12:00:00 AM) "In Berlant and Stewart's hands, affect theory provides a way of understanding the sensations and resignations of the present, the normalized exhaustion that comes with life in the new economy. It is a way of framing uniquely modern questions."--Hua Hsu "The New Yorker" (3/25/2019 12:00:00 AM) "The seemingly arbitrary parameters Berlant and Stewart put in place act out an illuminating thought experiment for the reader. . . . A haunting and thought-provoking read that asks readers to slow down and take stock of what is in front of them."--Julia Shiota "Ploughshares" (4/25/2019 12:00:00 AM) Review “Movements of attention to mostly ephemeral sights and happenings. Movements of wry, bemused, wistful, perplexed attention, that awaken desire and affection for things happening about us, and quicken an urge to know more. We should read but a page here and there at a time, and let this attentiveness extend into the rustle and whir of things about us. And how the freshness and spring of the language works to make us see what we loo