This issue of Departures asks us to honor and reckon with how we might live—ethically, resiliently, poetically, politically, and unapologetically—as well as how we might die. The essays show us how our lives and what we create as artists and writers might perform life-saving and life-affirming work. They also demonstrate how the ordinary and the extraordinary intersect in our daily existences, giving us glimpses into what Kathleen Stewart has described as ordinary affects:
Ordinary affects are “public feelings”—trauma, boundary crossing, shame, praise, systems that circulate knowledges and power relations—and also the intimacies and narratives that “give circuits and flows the forms of a life.”2 The collection opens with Shawna Malvini Redden's story of an emergency landing and the methodological and ethical considerations involved in writing about trauma for an author who is both narrator and researcher, as well as those who populate and circulate through her narrative. Utilizing...
University of California Press