Overview

Spatial Residue: Plastic Affects and Configurations of Place explores how places, whether abandoned malls, haunted swamps, or vintage video games, hold residues of history, feeling, and imagination. Mauve Perle Tahat traces how plastic, as both material and metaphor, shapes our environments and our inner lives, linking the persistence of pollution to the persistence of memory. The book moves across cultural terrains while grounding its analysis in real spaces. Combining autotheory, spatial critique, and cultural analysis, Spatial Residue uncovers how sites of ruin, spectacle, and play reveal deeper truths about survival, resilience, and belonging. It is a book about how we navigate the strange and often dissonant worlds we inherit, and how we might imagine alternative futures from their residues.

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Reviews

""Spatial Residue’s exploration of plastic and place as it relates to the physical, the temporal, and the psychic is nothing short of visionary. Dr. Mauve Perle Tahat very intentionally warps time and calls on us to interrogate the mise en abyme nature of the realms we inhabit. Personal and incisive, this book is a very needed triumph."" * Kailey Tedesco, author of MOTHERDEVIL and FOREVERHAUS * ""In Spatial Residue: Plastic Affects and Configurations of Place, Mauve Perle Tahat seamlessly mixes analyses of popular culture, poetry, the mundane, public art, and academic theory to consider the importance of spatial narratives in constructing meaning through the world around us—even through lacunae or absences, so often a part of space the Tahat demands should no longer go overlooked. In the current cultural moment when cultivating connection feels most urgent, Tahat’s work speaks to those who feel ‘unmoored’ and offers meditative reflection alongside deep intellectual investigation to help the reader arrive at specific and material strategies to find brightness in this flawed world. Tahat’s writing is equally personal and intellectual, giving the reader a kind and creative hand that leads one through some of the hardest questions we face today. This book is a treatise of what good can be found in this challenging world if we just look with a level of critical engagement combined with heart and love."" * Colleen Lutz Clemens, author of E=MC2: A Story Of Infertility, Miscarriage & Love * ""In Spatial Residue, Mauve Perle Tahat asks us to consider the many afterlives of places and their inhabitants. Through an examination of everything from pizza cheese to Charli XCX, motherhood to malls, AI to Appalachian forests, Tahat both enlivens and haunts phenomenological inquiry. A truly stunning work of gorgeous prose and heady theoretical reflection, Spatial Residue is a gift to thinkers who take seriously the stakes of our relationship to dwelling."" * Raechel Anne Jolie, author of Rust Belt Femme *

""Spatial Residue’s exploration of plastic and place as it relates to the physical, the temporal, and the psychic is nothing short of visionary. Dr. Mauve Perle Tahat very intentionally warps time and calls on us to interrogate the mise en abyme nature of the realms we inhabit. Personal and incisive, this book is a very needed triumph."" * Kailey Tedesco, author of MOTHERDEVIL and FOREVERHAUS *

Author Information

Mauve Perle Tahat, PhD, is a scholar of American literature and environmental humanities whose work explores carcerality, cultural memory, and place. They are the author of Ecologies of Incarceration: Carceral Discard Studies in the Anthropocene (Lexington, 2024) and the forthcoming Spatial Residue: Plastic Affects and Configurations of Place (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026).

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