Hundreds of words for Kathleen Stewart: A four-dimensional retirement party for metaphysical rhizomes

Abstract

This essay introduces a collection of one-hundred-word reflections celebrating Kathleen Stewart's retirement. Dozens of scholars participated in this celebration. Each participant wrote a one-hundred-word reflection to stand alone as an individually authored piece. The disconnected brevity of these reflections may catch some readers off guard. Thus, this introduction develops a lingua franca to welcome as many potential readers as possible. This lingua franca combines five dialects: poetic, metaphoric, bibliographic, historic, and dialogic. Grounded in poetic form, this introduction speaks in the metered voice of one-hundred-word chunks. Many of these chunks offer metaphorical proposals for how to read our celebratory collection. Bibliographic citations, appearing throughout, create affective resonances with various scholarly literatures. Acknowledging anthropology's emphasis on context specificity, some chunks describe the historical development of the one-hundred-word form. Dialogically, this introduction uses the second-person pronoun, you, to invite conversations rather than critiques. Such a five-part lingua franca engages two camps of readers: readers who enjoy experimentation may think this introduction is too paranoid; readers who cringe at experimentation may think this introduction is too poetic. Alienating as few readers as possible, this essay proposes a Goldilocks solution: not too paranoid, not too poetic, but just right—or “good enough” (Milo 2019).