Participation Type
Paper
Appalachian Identities: Naming and Claiming Differnece
Presentation #1 Title
“That’s what I mean by it’s like something’s trying to get you”: Slow Violence in Ann Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been
Presentation #1 Abstract or Summary
Rob Nixon has recently called upon scholars to eschew violence as “an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space” in favor of what he proposes as “slow violence […] that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed at violence at all.” While Nixon helpfully provides vocabulary for discussing this topic, readers familiar with Ann Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been will be all too aware of the impact of slow violence on both the public and domestic sphere.
Pancake’s novel centers on the Tulley-Sees, a family living in rural West Virginia, under the shadow of both the Yellowroot Mountain and the mining operation slowly decimating its peaks. Throughout the multi-narrator driven novel, Pancake presents readers with portent and devastation made manifest in the forms of cloudbursts, creek floodings, cancer, and joblessness. Notably, each of these traumas, for their explosive capacities, contains an encroaching and insidious slow violence. Most significantly, the gradual dissolution of the relationship of the novel’s central couple, Lace and Jimmy Make also experience slow violence. My essay argues that Lace and Jimmy Make’s relationship mirrors their environment, in how the violence laid bare upon the landscapes surrounding them begins to creep into their own lives, cascading in life-altering traumas both for the participants and their families, and how scholars might approach these scenes of devastation in understanding the novel’s characters.
At-A-Glance Bio- Presenter #1
Jim Coby is a lecturer of English at the University of the Alabama in Huntsville. His work focuses on ecologies and the U.S. South. He has works published or forthcoming on Ron Rash, Ellen Glasgow, Jesmyn Ward, and Matthew Griffin, among others.
“That’s what I mean by it’s like something’s trying to get you”: Slow Violence in Ann Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been
Rob Nixon has recently called upon scholars to eschew violence as “an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space” in favor of what he proposes as “slow violence […] that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed at violence at all.” While Nixon helpfully provides vocabulary for discussing this topic, readers familiar with Ann Pancake’s Strange As This Weather Has Been will be all too aware of the impact of slow violence on both the public and domestic sphere.
Pancake’s novel centers on the Tulley-Sees, a family living in rural West Virginia, under the shadow of both the Yellowroot Mountain and the mining operation slowly decimating its peaks. Throughout the multi-narrator driven novel, Pancake presents readers with portent and devastation made manifest in the forms of cloudbursts, creek floodings, cancer, and joblessness. Notably, each of these traumas, for their explosive capacities, contains an encroaching and insidious slow violence. Most significantly, the gradual dissolution of the relationship of the novel’s central couple, Lace and Jimmy Make also experience slow violence. My essay argues that Lace and Jimmy Make’s relationship mirrors their environment, in how the violence laid bare upon the landscapes surrounding them begins to creep into their own lives, cascading in life-altering traumas both for the participants and their families, and how scholars might approach these scenes of devastation in understanding the novel’s characters.
