Participation Type
Panel
Session Title
Critical Approaches to Appalachian Identity Politics
Session Abstract or Summary
The past years have seen a resurgence in mainstream discussions of the idea of “the Appalachian.” Centering on a constellation of topics, prominently including the regional support for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election and the controversy surrounding the publication of J. D. Vance’s autobiography Hillbilly Elegy, many regional responses to these discussions took up an apologetic project of identifying their collapse into long-standing regional stereotyping, diagnosing them as recapitulations of the “Culture of Poverty” model, or classifying a set of commentators as regional “outsiders,” themselves replicating forms of Appalachian exceptionalism and reconstituting the region as a zone of racial innocence. The papers in this panel seek to complicate these debates in critically examining the convenient myths promoted in Appalachian identitarian activist and scholarly discourse, particularly in relation to the largely uncontested “weight of whiteness” on both sides of these conversations, and which inhibit a more nuanced understanding and complex portrait of the region and its political dynamics. This panel seeks to explore the consequences of these perspectives for both regional research projects and community organizing.
Presentation #1 Title
The Land Studies of the Conquerer: Terra Nullius and the "Just Transition"
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Published in 1981 by the Land Ownership Task Force, the first regional survey of land ownership patterns marked a watershed in Appalachian scholarship and activism, and has served as a model for the 2013 study "Who Owns West Virginia in the 21st Century?" and the contemporary Appalachian Land Study Working Group. Studies of this sort and scope utilized to negotiate intra-settler capitalist disputations over land ownership, along with their grassroots participatory research models, are a striking form of settler land politics without a clear analog in other identitarian settler projects. From the frameworks of critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies, this paper takes up a critical examination of these land study projects, their analytical categories (such as "absentee ownership"), and their political aims (including the recent activist discourse of a "just transition"), which have served to erase histories of original and ongoing Native dispossession while calcifying the settler colonial project. In response, this paper concludes with a discussion of how Native theorizations of decolonization point toward political solidarities and research projects that can escape the pitfalls of cohered identitarian mythologies of the white "Appalachian" indigène, regional conservative multiculturalism, and racialized national-populism.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Stephen Pearson is an independent researcher on occupied Shawnee land. His research investigates the intersections of critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies, Marxian political economy, and Appalachian studies.
Presentation #2 Title
Nationalism in Appalachia’s Queer Community
Presentation #2 Abstract or Summary
Primarily discussing the support by queer people in Appalachia for the Democratic Party and "gay-friendly" corporations, this paper points out the contradictions between these ostensibly progressive or pragmatic stances and the exploitation and oppression of colonized and Third World queer communities. Utilizing specific case studies from left-wing "back to the land" and "patriotic" movements in the region, in support for local and national politicians from Joe Manchin to Bernie Sanders, and in the embrace of corporate involvement in regional queer cultural institutions such as Pride, this paper will seek to demonstrate how the synthesis of "hillbilly" and "queer" more often than not loses a truly intersectional character in regards to politics on the global scale. The paper will also spend some time defining terms surrounding what a political identity community is, what queerdom is in Appalachian society, how American and Appalachian nationalism relate within contemporary Appalachian politics, and the need for a politics of liberation as opposed to assimilation.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #2
John Ross is a philosophy major at Marshall University. His interests within political thinking include settler colonialism, Marxism, and intersectionality. Other interests in philosophy include Biblical criticism and the ethical and political implications in language by discussing possibility in relation to infinity within contemporary continental philosophy.
Presentation #3 Title
The Myth of the "Fed Up with the Status Quo" Trump Voter
Presentation #3 Abstract or Summary
In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump swept Appalachia in a campaign characterized by racial dog-whistling and pledges to intensify racial oppression through the expansion of deportations, heightened police surveillance of Black and Brown communities, and increased funding for anti-immigrant national security projects. These results stood in striking comparison to the region’s electoral rejection of Barack Obama. Regional progressive commentators have argued that Trump’s electoral success in Appalachia does not reflect support for Trump’s white supremacist politics, but should instead be seen as a progressive and class conscious “fed up” rejection by an ostensibly “forgotten” segment of regional whites of the neoliberal “status quo” characterized by Hilary Clinton. This study challenges this notion, exploring both the politics of these commentator’s preferred candidate Bernie Sanders (whose support in Appalachia is marshalled as evidence of regional anti-racism), data on voter support for nationalist and chauvinist policies and experiences from regional organizing, and the politics and rhetoric of regional Trump supporters in the context of the long history of regional oppression of Native, Black, and other colonized people, and the imperialist position of America in the contemporary world-system. I will also explore the politics and strategies of activist organizations which embrace this narrative of the “fed up” Trump voter, such as Redneck Revolt.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #3
Benji Pyles is an activist and organizer in the Tri-State region, born and raised in Huntington, WV.
Presentation #4 Title
Blackout: Race and Historical Erasure in Appalachian Coal Mines
Presentation #4 Abstract or Summary
During the 2016 presidential election, there was many discussions on the need for America to care more on the plight of those suffering from rural poverty, in particular Appalachians. Coal miners due to their historical significance to the region were singled out by President Trump as victims hurt by a mixture of government overregulation and environmentalism. Much was made in the press on the need to remember the coal miners as human beings suffering from chronic depression rather than racist hillbilly caricatures. However, almost all of these depictions portrayed miners as always being lower-class white males. This ignores historical records that show miners to be a more diverse group of workers, including blacks and women. This paper will examine why the stories of black and female miners are often left in the historical narrative of Appalachians. It will always challenge the common claim on the political left that racism among Appalachian lower-class whites is tool used by wealthy capitalists such as mine owners to divide the working class. Using the historical examples of the unionization drives of the early 20th century, racism was willing practiced by lower-class whites not to divide them but to guard their material benefits and wages from competing blacks.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #4
Derrick Thomas a graduate student at Wright State University enrolled in the History program. He is a native of Cincinnati.
Conference Subthemes
Diversity and Inclusion, Economic Development
The Land Studies of the Conquerer: Terra Nullius and the "Just Transition"
Published in 1981 by the Land Ownership Task Force, the first regional survey of land ownership patterns marked a watershed in Appalachian scholarship and activism, and has served as a model for the 2013 study "Who Owns West Virginia in the 21st Century?" and the contemporary Appalachian Land Study Working Group. Studies of this sort and scope utilized to negotiate intra-settler capitalist disputations over land ownership, along with their grassroots participatory research models, are a striking form of settler land politics without a clear analog in other identitarian settler projects. From the frameworks of critical Indigenous and settler colonial studies, this paper takes up a critical examination of these land study projects, their analytical categories (such as "absentee ownership"), and their political aims (including the recent activist discourse of a "just transition"), which have served to erase histories of original and ongoing Native dispossession while calcifying the settler colonial project. In response, this paper concludes with a discussion of how Native theorizations of decolonization point toward political solidarities and research projects that can escape the pitfalls of cohered identitarian mythologies of the white "Appalachian" indigène, regional conservative multiculturalism, and racialized national-populism.
