Gathering Wild Greens

Elizabeth Engelhardt examines Depression-era novels and other sources to examine foodways in Appalachian and southern mill towns in relation to the dietary disease of pellagra. Foraging the commons for wild greens, while not actually curing pellagra, was nonetheless curative for other reasons. Gathering wild greens challenged unbalanced diets and the overreliance on processed foods as well as the regimentation of corporatized clock time and the unhealthy conditions of factory life, consumerism, and commodification. Wandering and gathering in wild places may likewise be curative for at least some of the ills that threaten higher education today.

“There Are No Gay People Here”

This chapter explores the intersections between place and identity. The quote in the title is from the author’s ethnographic fieldwork in Kentucky, during which a politician indicated that no one identified as queer in his district because he represented a rural region of the state. This led the author to consider further the logic through which queer identity is associated with urban identity, and what that means for rural queer youth. She offers the concept of “boundary publics” to discuss the ways in which ephemeral experiences of belonging are created within more validated and recognized public spheres. She gives examples of how rural Kentucky queer young people, for example, create spaces for belonging within shared social networks and available public spaces, such as parks, churches, and Walmart.

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.

Reclaiming Place

bell hooks’s poems from her book Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place are reprinted throughout this collection, illustrating how place matters. In this chapter on reclaiming place and making home, the author describes her life journey from growing up in rural Kentucky—experiencing both racial apartheid and a connection with the land and generations of family there—to her adult life outside the state and then her return to make her home in Berea and reclaim Kentucky as a place. She describes that process of making home, living with love, and broader connections among people of color, the land, and environmental activism.

Buckwild Mad Men

This chapter examines the depiction of masculinity in two early twenty-first-century representations of Appalachia: the short-lived reality show Buckwild and Rebecca Scott’s Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appalachian Coalfields. Both texts offer portraits of men contending with their vanishing ways of life. The author analyzes these representations as depictions that shape ideas of manhood and proposes necropolitics as a framework for theorizing coal war fields of a globalized economy. The chapter thereby takes “place” as a matrix of meanings that includes racialized, classed, and gendered politics of space, and the social identities emerging from those configured areas.

Place, Autonomy, and the Politics of Hope

The geographer John Pickles defines place as the locus of natural and social life worlds, which provides an operative context of common understandings, institutions, and practices along with the natural environment that sustains the life of communities. He characterizes the defense of these “commons” as the arena in which place-based activism takes center stage. From opposition to mountaintop removal mining to forest and waterways environmentalism, “commons” activism has a long history in Appalachia. The author provides theoretical guidelines for how to think about this activism in relation to the Occupy movement, Right to the City, global labor, and worldwide autonomization movements.

Transforming Places

Smith, a sociologist, contends that the politicization of “place” deserves serious attention, and she contests the common view, especially on the Left, that local, place-based politics is inadequate, futile, and reactionary for confronting globalization. Highlighting exemplary grassroots strategies in Appalachia that she describes as “making space,” “crossing space,” and “transgressing space,” she points toward potentially effective forms of locally based global politics of place that challenge the neoliberal privatization of common places and resources described, in her words, as analogous to prison “lockdowns.”

Teaching Region

The final chapter in this book examines pedagogies of place. The seven authors discuss the pitfalls and promises of teaching regional studies in or on Appalachia, the South and Southwest, the Midwest, and New England as well as trans-regional Native American studies. They discuss whether and how region still matters to the students they encounter, what role they think region should play in contemporary social science and humanities pedagogy, and how they attempt to leverage interests in regional inequities and uneven geographic development to provoke student insights into other varieties of social injustice.

Somewheres on the Track

The authors illustrate, as artists and musicians—with paintings reproduced in the chapter and music hosted on a website by the University Press of Kentucky—the significance of learning place over generations through sight and sound. Art and music can be evocative of experiences of place in unique ways. Ron Pen gives an example of a fiddle tune that is both local and global, as an introduction to this conversation between Rich Kirby and John Haywood. All three play old-time Appalachian music, and Haywood is also a visual artist. They reflect on the relationships among art, music, memory, and place in their lives and work.