The question lingers, booms: what is someone from Nashville doing, claiming to represent Appalachia?
It would be all too easy to content myself with Ronald Eller’s attempt to universalize Appalachia in the introduction to his now-classic study on the development of Appalachia, Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945 (2008), and simply repeat: We are all Appalachians.
However, this answer, understandably, makes those engaged in the cottage industry of Appalachia discourse uncomfortable.
Take the niche hit, What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia (2018), in which Elizabeth Catte––in step with critics of the imperialist ‘gaze’ (such as Edward Said in his Orientalism)––draws the distinction between “ways of seeing or looking at Appalachia…[in projects] created by Appalachians as opposed to those that are about Appalachians” (99).
Clearly, this piece falls into the latter category.
Catte––as well as those who are, arguably, not even especially aligned with Catte’s populism––claims that attempts to ‘modernize’ Appalachia have required a narrative of Appalachia as the ‘other America.’
This quality of otherness is often conditioned by the needs––psychological, sociological, economic, etc.––of those existing outside the region: e.g., most recently in the ‘Trump Country’ genre––which is an effort, built on false assumptions, by a conglomerated, wide-spread media apparatus that fetishizes certain portions of the Appalachian population, particularly downwardly mobile whites, in order to understand the ailments of the common American circa the 2016 election.
Appalachia is the ‘other America,’ meaning that we compartmentalize our anxieties about ourselves into an image of Appalachia that stands apart from ourselves in such a form that we could understand it as an environment to regulate and master. These images often do not account for certain factors, which then return in unexplainable forms, requiring further mystification: America’s sleep of reason produces the monsters of Appalachia.
Yet, I will argue, this ‘otherness’ that Appalachia finds itself characterized as a framework that is quite easy for us to swallow since it does not reflect a challenge to how we live our day-to-day lives in a materially meaningful way. A more authentic otherness, understood as integral to both Appalachia’s internal mechanics and the way those mechanics influence and are determined by their surroundings, is necessary to comprehend Appalachia in a way that questions our own self-understanding.
It is an otherness that will ultimately reflect our own uprootedness.
As mentioned earlier in reference to Said, the process of defining regions in a particular (‘hegemonic’) framework, such as Appalachia as ‘Trump Country,’ to open up new markets is, of course, not unique to Appalachia.
Going back to Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1820), this idea (¶246), which means to explain the unfolding mechanics of a state-regulated market economy (‘the inner dialectic of society’), claims that for this kind of economic system to perpetuate its social dynamics, the vast amounts of wealth collected from the surplus-value (that is, money made that does not go toward the cost required to continue to produce a particular commodity) belonging to a bourgeois class must find expression through the expansion of markets.
As David Harvey points out in his article “The ‘New’ Imperialism: Accumulation by Dispossession,” the surpluses created by intense capital extraction (such as by Jeffersonian yeoman farmers in the American South via slave labor on the vast tracts of land made available through the ‘founding’ of America) necessitates the expansion of markets, particularly by what Harvey calls ‘geographical expansion.’
Geographical expansion is nothing less than the formal creation of new territories that can be assimilated into a particular, often ideological, economic vision, often for the sake of ‘progress,’ though rarely improving the quality of life of the inhabitants.
New locations are titled so that the movement of people and goods between these borders can be regulated and maintained.
Thus, it should come as no surprise that, following the Keynesian expansion of the US economy during WWII, Appalachia should find itself the target of development projects that ignored the particular needs of Appalachia in favor of a framework that was compatible with the needs of an ever-expanding and unstable economic system.
In this sense, I can sympathize with critics of the othering of Appalachia. Insofar as a people’s outwardly projected image is determined by the needs of those looking in, they will remain either without a platform or only given a platform if they reflect the particular needs of those who would profit off of them.
Yet, I cannot shake the feeling that if Eller is correct––if we are all Appalachians––then we are all displaced people who are, to a large degree, othered to ourselves in the wake of cultural dissolution.
We, embracing this otherness, manifest an anxiety reflected from the most callous calls of the decline of Western Values to neo-pagan cultural spheres that seek a return to a holistically integrated lifestyle, or foregrounded and, sometimes, celebrated in the aesthetics of vaporwave and other self-consciously ‘postmodern’ artforms.
So, if Appalachians want to know themselves authentically, where can they go?
Take the example of Knoxville: on the one hand, this is a region that celebrates its Appalachian pride, embracing its historical roots that paint a picture of progress and solidarity.
On the other hand, like anywhere else in the country, those who have had the most influence in shaping Knoxville are those who have had the fewest ties to the community. Often, they are brought in as specialists to facilitate modernization in the forms of damning, ‘urban renewal,’ and the cycles of gentrification starting back with the first mountaineers’ often hostile relationship with native peoples.
The art scene that arises from this college town is cosmopolitan and built on the same technologies that deny the possibility of an authentic return to a nostalgic agrarian vision agrarian mode of mountain living.
Not that I mean to discourage those involved in these communities. Many of these art scenes attempt to negotiate more traditional forms of Appalachian culture into modern technologies, seemingly co-existing with movements such as Afro-futurism in their attempts to embrace features of a modern, global economy while holding onto traditional forms of expression.
On the other hand, we have the pockets of impoverished regions on the outskirts, and within the city, the homeless are treated with hostility as their camps are uprooted to make Knoxville less of a so-called ‘shithole region.’
Who are the true Appalachians?
How a publication like Appalachian Free Press can represent Appalachia for the good of all of its residents remains an open question. Only time will reveal the truth of this claim.
The presence of invasive species from Kudzu to the Starling already presents obvious objections about diametrically opposed interests. All I can say for now is that Appalachia stands as a great contradiction.
Geographically, its delimitation has been hotly contested up to the present. Its people make up a wide variety of classes and interests. Our understanding of the region as culturally distinct seems at the very least problematic.
Without ignoring the historical particularities of the region’s development (something which, ideally, this publication will be capable of charting), I believe we must keep in mind that the historical ‘othering’ of Appalachia is what has allowed those who are geographically detached to gain some proximity to it.
In reference to the title of this article, it is a more challenging and authentic othering of our traditional modes of understanding the Appalachian region that can allow us to seek new types of political formation and mobilization.
Just as there was no guarantee that America would reach the shape that it is in today in the aftermath of any number of its historical developments, there is no guarantee of success that can be provided in embarking on such a project.
While we cannot unreflectively rely on Appalachian traditions to create the conditions for a broadly satisfactory political consensus, we must not forget that it is in the contested space of Appalachian traditions that this work necessarily must unfold. However, we cannot unreflectively rely on our traditional methods of identification to produce broadly satisfactory results. In this hope, a new Appalachia can be fashioned, one that can embody a more genuinely universal grounding.
This new form of life is an inevitability. The question now is: how do we want to partake in its unfolding?
In the wake of global existential problems, it is clear that we either live together or fry together. As Rosa Luxemburg’s popular slogan goes, the necessity of discovering a new form of life is a question of the choice between socialism or barbarism.
