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Abstract
In Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s documentary King Coal (2023) coal is being referred to as a matter that is “not dirty or clean, but elemental.” The acclaimed film centers on the complex histories and cultures of coal in Central Appalachia, based on the perspective of Sheldon, a coal miner’s daughter, and a West Virginia native. The elemental nature of coal is explored in the film by situating coal less as a resource and more as a mythic foundation for the community's cultural history. This article puts King Coal in conversation with Barbara Kopple's seminal Harlan County, USA (1976) which narrates the more than a year-long struggle of Brookside miners in Southeastern Kentucky against Duke Power Company in 1973-74. The article explores the intersection of feminist documentary filmmaking and elemental thinking in the portrayal of coal’s complex materialities in the Appalachian region. It also explores how these films, by articulating an elemental belonging to coal, gesture at a different experience of crisis and the future, especially as the crisis of Appalachia, in the context of the declining coal production in the region, continues to animate the American political imagination in the year marking the 50th anniversary of the Brookside struggle. The article argues how these films, separated by five decades, portray coal’s elemental nature not through its discrete materiality, but rather in its hybrid and transitional conditions that always anticipate their next material phase. Thereby, these elemental narratives of coal, and the crisis of Appalachia, offer an alternative lens on the region’s future: with or without coal. Drawing on theories of environmental media studies and feminist documentary studies, and critically analyzing the representation of the matter of coal in these films, this article explores how coal’s elemental conditions are both cultural and environmental: they are rooted in the entangled hybridity of coal’s geo-cultural materiality and the feminist reimagining of Appalachia’s planetary futures.
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Mukherjee, Somak.
"Fire in the Hole: Appalachia’s Elemental Narrative in Harlan County, USA and King Coal."
Critical Humanities
4,
1
(2025).
DOI: https://doi.org/10.33470/2836-3140.1085