Affective Critical Regionality applies the work of such prominent theorists as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Brian Massumi, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour (as well as Fredric Jameson's stray thoughts on regionalism) to readings of Charles Olsen, D. J. Waldie, Kathleen Stewart, Rebecca Solnit, Willie Vlautin, and Karen Tei Yamashita. What links this latter list of writers, other than Campbell's interpretation of them as pioneers of “affective critical regionality,” is a focus on the American West as a center of (in the language of the Deleuzean theory that animates much of Campbell's argument) “deterritorialization.”Footnote ¹

Campbell devotes his introduction and first chapter to the theory that informs his preference for “regionality” over “regionalism.” Where “regionalism” names a type of literature that values fidelity to the local, the literature of “critical regionality” commits to the local but resists the idea of spatial integrity. Where studies of regionalism demonstrate the capacity of literature to construct a sense of place, Campbell's study demonstrates the way in which certain kinds of commitment to place can “‘unmoor’ readers, challenge perceptions, and provoke variance instead of certitude” (197). Where regionalism can promote static or reductive sensibilities, affective critical regionality is “interventionist in wider … global projects” (3). Such interventions are made at the level of formal experimentation.

Campbell's discussion of formal experimentation is unique in its assertion that experimental writing can be a form of civic engagement. The literature he champions is alive with an “intimate relationality”; it is writing that “makes us [readers] responsible for each entity within the web of connections” (13). This notion of the efficacy of experimental writing parallels Lauren Berlant's conception of citizenship as an expression of the “pleasure of coming together” and literature as a “performative belonging to the now in which potentiality is affirmed” (Berlant quoted at 19). The road to this acknowledgement of the overlap between the experimental and the civic is not without its challenges.

For one, Campbell's treatment of critical theory alongside experimental writing often assumes more correspondence between theory and literature than is effectively demonstrated. Where treatment of Stewart's and Solnit's writing as thus hybrid is warranted, similar assertions elsewhere are less self-evident. Campbell, however, does trace convincingly the influence of philosopher Alfred North Whitehead and geographer Carl Ortwin Sauer on Olsen's work. Olsen's “dialogues” with Whitehead contributed to Olsen's conviction that “form is never more than an extension of content” and thus to his status as a pioneer of critical regionality (73). Another challenge that grows from Campbell's commitment to expressing the porousness between the theoretical and the literary is found in his very sentences, which often integrate quotations from critical theory so thoroughly to their own grammar as to make the source of a given assertion difficult to determine. Though frustrating, this indeterminacy is in keeping with Campbell's dedication to avoiding ideas that are reducible to normative binaries.

Each of the writers discussed in Affective Critical Regionality treats the American West in a way that facilitates counterintuitive learning experiences. For instance, D. J. Waldie's memoir Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir (1996) amounts to a convincing defense of the suburbs. Waldie takes on such orthodoxies of regional and urban theory as Mike Davis's apocalyptic view of southern California. Taking seriously his dual task as both memoirist and public servant (Waldie is a former deputy city manager of Lakewood, CA), Waldie limns the value of places otherwise eclipsed by uncritical acceptance of received (often corporate) cartographies. His championing of the suburbs, his finding that the “suburban grid offers both containment and contentment, perhaps like religion,” hint at a post-secularity that is latent in Campbell's own project (93).

But the “post-” most clearly active in Affective Critical Regionality is that of post-criticism. Campbell's reading of Stewart demonstrates an affinity for what Latour calls “compositionism,” an “alternative to critique's tendency toward transcendence and the belief that through debunking, unveiling, and revealing, one might reach ‘privileged access to a world beyond the veils of appearance’” (113, imbedded quotation from Latour). A similar skepticism about critique is evident in Solnit, whose work demonstrates more than it solves the “sense of distance and remoteness played out as the friction between the ‘faraway nearby’” (113). In such a context, Vlautin and Yamashita can seem almost anomalous: Vlautin's text a dirty realist counternarrative and Yamashita the transpacific cartographer of “postwestern” California. Though the chapters on Vlautin and Yamashita deflect somewhat from the book's intervention into broader questions about the future of literary criticism, they are integral contributions to the book's set of exhaustively researched case studies of the contemporary writers who have affectively deterritorialized the American West.