“Penned Against the Wall”

Although the Appalachian region has long been associated with white racial identity, Latinx people remain the region's largest and fastest-growing minority. What perspectives and experiences are revealed when such narratives of whiteness are challenged by the visibility of Latinx migrants? What does music tell us about ongoing discourses of migration and border-crossings? This essay analyzes Latinx immigration narratives in Appalachian music and offers the possibility of a Latinx-Appalachian musical and cultural resonances. I take up the music of artists who claim hybrid Latinx-Appalachian cultural and musical identities. Namely, this essay focuses on Che Apalache—a four-piece band based in Buenos Aires that plays “Latingrass”—and the Lua Project—a five-piece band based in Charlottesville, Virginia, that plays “Mexilachian” music. Using field recordings and ethnographic interviews with both groups, this essay analyzes references to U.S.-Mexico border politics, acts of border crossing, and Latin American-Appalachian geographic similarities. I engage U.S.-based Latinx studies and Appalachian studies to establish relationships of Appalachian and Latinx cultures and incorporate analyses of both Spanish and English lyrics. Ultimately, this essay suggests that listening for Latinx migration narratives in Appalachian music challenges assumptions of belonging in the shifting U.S. cultural landscape.

Higher Ground Project

The power of community is at the center of a series of musical plays created by the Higher Ground Project, which is composed of students at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College and residents of Harlan County, Kentucky, and is spearheaded by Robert Gipe, director of the college’s Appalachian Program. The plays begin with oral histories gathered by Appalachian studies students and other Harlan County community members as part of grants awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Appalachian Regional Commission; from these interviews, Higher Ground participants create musical theater. Playwright Jo Carson worked with the project for its first play....

Wilma Dykeman

As a journalist, historian, essayist, novelist, and short story writer in the mid-twentieth century, Wilma Dykeman was in the vanguard of the new Appalachian studies movement. Dykeman was born in Asheville, North Carolina, where her mother’s family had lived for generations. After graduating from Northwestern University in 1940, she married James Stokely Jr., a poet and son of an East Tennessee canning company magnate, with whom she reported on the civil rights movement in the 1950s....

The Power of Place and the Place of Power

The political scientist John Gaventa’s prizewinning analysis of power and powerlessness was a foundational study in the early development of Appalachian studies. In this chapter he outlines a new, multidimensional conception of power (the “power cube”) to understand the “power of place” and the “place of power.” He suggests that effective efforts at place-based social transformation must operate on three dimensions that challenge the forms, spaces, and levels of power. He also describes how the places in which he has worked and lived, including African nations, Appalachia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, have influenced his thinking about power dynamics.

Place Matters

The editors discuss how this collection grew out of a two-year lecture series, “Place Matters,” at the University of Kentucky as well as a session at the South Atlantic Modern Language Association titled “Teaching Region,” and they describe how the interdisciplinary contributions in this volume reflect the broad, collaborative conversations among scholars, activists, and artists that constitute Appalachian studies. They discuss ways in which this volume illustrates diversity and agency within the region, through the lens of place. They contest the binary opposition between local places and global processes to suggest how a focus on region provides insights into the distinct ways in which the local and global are articulated, and they provide a brief overview of the chapters and themes in the rest of the book.

Appalachia in Regional Context

In an increasingly globalized world, place matters more than ever. That is certainly the case in Appalachian studies—a field that brings scholars, activists, artists, and citizens together around a region to contest misappropriations of resources and power and combat stereotypes of isolation and intolerance. In Appalachia in Regional Context: Place Matters, the diverse ways in which place is invoked, the person who invokes it, and the reasons behind that invocation all matter greatly. In this collection, scholars and artists are assembled from a variety of disciplines to broaden the conversation. The book begins with chapters challenging conventional representations of Appalachia by exploring theoretically the relationships among regionalism, globalism, activism, and everyday experience. Other chapters examine, for example, foodways, depictions of Appalachian gendered and racialized identity in popular culture, the experiences of rural LGBTQ youth, and the pitfalls and promises of teaching regional studies. Poems by the renowned social critic bell hooks interleave the chapters and add context to reflections on the region. Drawing on cultural anthropology, sociology, geography, media studies, political science, gender and women’s studies, ethnography, social theory, art, music, and literature, this volume furthers the exploration of new perspectives on one of America’s most compelling and misunderstood regions.

Then-what Days

This chapter recounts Still’s transition from teaching at Morehead to living in Knott County where problems and change were increasingly evident. President Johnson’s War on Poverty put a national focus on the region’s economy and environment. Still continued to develop his public personality during the 1970s and built connections with people like Cratis Williams, Robert Higgs, Harry Caudill, Bill Weinberg, and Mike Mullins. He was inadvertently becoming part of the emerging Appalachian Studies movement that would lead eventually to the title unofficially bestowed on him: Dean of Appalachian Literature.

Religion, Place, and Mountaintop Removal

This chapter examines the historical development of anti-mountaintop removal activism in Appalachia in the early twenty-first century. The chapter first examines how twenty-first-century groups such as Mountain Justice emerged out of decades of localized activism against strip mining in the area. It then outlines the theoretical influences from Appalachian studies and religious studies that have shaped this discussion of religion and place in Appalachia, including studies of Appalachian history and development, critical regionalism, and approaches to “lived religion.” Based on these theoretical concepts, the remainder of the book explores multiple religious threads in the re-imagining of Appalachian place by anti-mountaintop removal activists in light of a physically transformed topography.

Religion and Resistance in Appalachia

This volume examines the complex roles of religious values and perceptions of place in the efforts of twenty-first-century anti-mountaintop removal activists in Appalachia. Applying theoretical insights from religious studies, Appalachian studies, and critical regionalism, the work charts how views of Appalachian place were transformed and revised through activism and how different religious threads were involved in that process, weaving together patterns of meaning and significance to help motivate activist efforts and reshape visions of Appalachia. The specific religious threads examined include Catholic and mainline Protestant visions of eco-justice (or religiously inspired arguments in support of social and environmental justice), evangelical Christian views of Creation Care (a term encompassing multiple visions of theocentric stewardship ethics), and forms of nature-venerating spirituality (including spiritual and religious proponents of biocentric ethics and “dark green religion”). These religious perspectives encountered friction with other perspectives, structures, and practices, generating new perspectives on the issue formed from physical interactions between diverse stakeholders as well as new visions for Appalachia in a post-mountaintop removal future. The work points to ways that scholars might continue to analyze the interconnections between local religious values and perceptions of place, influencing further studies in the interdisciplinary field of religion and nature, place studies, and social movements.