Constructing an Exceptional Region: Recurrent Emergence of Appalachia

• In Event: Southern Exceptionalism Revisited: Constructing a Myth Through Negotiations and Collaborations

Abstract

Since Henry D. Shapiro’s seminal work on the idea of Appalachia—Appalachia on Our Mind: The Southern Mountains and Mountaineers in the American Consciousness, 1870-1920 –in 1978, the nature of the idea of Appalachia, or the constructed-ness of Appalachia has been discussed. Negative assumptions that the area is a peculiar, exceptional region inhabited by a homogeneous people with a shared culture that has lagged behind the industrialization and urbanization of the United States and also of the South since the late 19th century, or positive assumptions that the region is a repository of individualism and self-reliance, have been deployed in the negotiation with the national context.
The major deployment of the Appalachian image of poverty and aberration in the 20th century includes Michael Harrington’s The Other America during John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, in which images of poor Appalachian communities produced by, for example, a CBS film “Christmas in Appalachia,” marked a sharp contrast with the prosperity enjoyed by the “affluent society.” In the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, former U.S. Army Reservist Lynndie England, who grew up in a trailer park in West Virginia, was repeatedly referred to as if a symbolic figure of the bizarre and abusive incident. She was always connected to her Appalachian origins and treated as a hillbilly, an embodiment of poor white trash. We can also include a recent association of J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy with the Trump Phenomenon.
If Appalachia is constructed, then when and how is it constructed? This exceptional region is apparently constructed in a mutually constitutive negotiation between the region and the nation, in the negotiation with the national context such as the war on poverty or the war on terrorism. This paper explores the discursive repositories for this figuration of the exceptional, peculiar region in the cultural and political arena of negotiation to discuss how the demythologizing and dismissal of the constructed Appalachia as an exceptionalism is inadequate without probing the broader cultural and political context.
Taking up the Theodore Dreiser Committee’s report Harlan Miners Speak (1932) and James Dickey’s novel Deliverance (1970) as examples, this paper examines how Appalachia has been enmeshed in a complex context of political and cultural negotiations not only within the South but also between the South and the nation, and how it has been an intertextual construction. The former will show how the experience of coal miners was appropriated as an epitome of the predicament of laborers by leftist writers who, though anxious to protect workers, yet circumscribed them within the stereotype of impoverished Appalachian people. In Deliverance, the stereotypical image of hillbillies is employed in a different context; there we find a desire to delineate an Appalachia that is out of step with the modernization of the urban areas where the protagonists live in the complex constellation of the national, the urban South, and the rural South. The complicated configuration of “the exceptional” indicates there is still a lot to investigate in Southern “exceptionality.”

Author

• Hiromi Ochi, Hitotsubashi University, Japan