Welcome to Working History, a podcast produced for the Southern Labor Studies Association. Become a member online at www.southernlaborstudies.org. I'm series host Beth English and today I'm speaking with Anthony Harkins, Professor of History at Western Kentucky University and Meredith McCarrel, Director of Writing in Redrick at Bowdoin College. We're discussing their co-edited book, Appalachian Reckoning, a Region Response to Hillbilly Elegy, published by West Virginia University Press.
Tony Harkins and Meredith McCarrel, welcome to Working History. Thanks for having us. My pleasure. My pleasure.
The title of your book is Appalachian Reckoning. Why did you choose Reckoning for the title? It was tough trying to figure out what to call this book and there was lots of back and forth and I guess we reckoned with the title a lot. I really like the term Reckoning because of the dual meanings of that word and the way that that word is situated in Appalachian and Southern culture.
So to me, a Reckoning is a way to make things right but also to reckon with something is to think about it in a deep way and I think this book is trying to do both of those things. I think that's exactly right. We liked the duality of it and the notion that it was both framing itself as a response to the largely critical or concerned response to Hillbilly Elegy but also that it was a broader kind of struggle over the identity and the meaning and the place of Appalachian today's society. And let's continue a little bit with that.
For better or worse, JD Vance's memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, prompted a surge of interest in and conversations about this region that's broadly known as Appalachia. I mean, in and of itself, it's very diverse but this kind of big thing in people's imagination. What prompted you to publish the book in response? What made you feel like it needed formal published response number one?
And then where do you, number two, see this book fitting into the broader recent conversations about the region? Well, the book, really not as credit West Virginia Press because they came to both of us as far as putting a book together and it grew out of a panel on reactions to Hillbilly Elegy at the Appalachian Studies Association Conference a couple of years ago and many of the most of the panelists are in the book as contributors. And it was clear that there was a general, there was a big reaction to Hillbilly Elegy but there was also, you know, on the national stage but there was also growing concern about it and how it was once again framing Appalachian very narrow terms and sort of framing or positioning, essentially or not, positioning itself as a kind of single story of Appalachian. We both thought it was very important to have multiple voices responding to that to emphasize its diversity, to emphasize the concerns people have with Hillbilly Elegy but we also have contributors who defend aspects of the book and think it was an important conversation starter.
Yeah, I think it's important to speak, especially with your potentially broader group of listeners, I have forgotten sometimes that not everyone in the country understands why Hillbilly Elegy or that Hillbilly Elegy caused such a splash, especially in Appalachia. There really was, that was a really intense several months leading up to the presidential election of 2016 and then following the presidential election. There was a lot of attention on Appalachia, probably maybe simplifying ways that people were trying to think about the election and trying to understand the way that voters were thinking about that election and Appalachia, as you said, is this very complex 13 state region but it kind of was seen as a single voting bloc and so leading up to the election and following the election, there was a lot of tension paid to Appalachia and some of it was not really very complex and so I think that Hillbilly Elegy stepped in and answered questions that a lot of people had around that time leading up to but especially after the election, trying to understand where those votes were coming from and the answer that Hillbilly Elegy gave felt too simplistic for most people in the area and so that was one thing but I think it's important too to frame that the way that readers responded to Hillbilly Elegy was maybe more what people in Appalachia were reacting to even more than the book itself. I think that a lot of people looked at Hillbilly Elegy and saw that as a way to understand Appalachia and therefore had their simple answer and felt like they understood Appalachia and were looking no further and the answer that he gives is one that allows people to kind of turn away from Appalachia.
So I think that zooming in and really thinking about why this book was so divisive and why so many people within Appalachia especially reacted to it is part of understanding the reasons that it made a lot of sense for us to have a collection of responses to Hillbilly Elegy. And for our listeners who may not have read Hillbilly Elegy, could one or both of you just sort of give us a real quick kind of broad brush strokes what the main thrust of the argument is if that's made an book? Yeah, I'll try. I mean it's a memoir, right?
But it's more. But it's called a memoir of a family and culture and crisis. So the way that it sort of conflates family and culture is much of a problem. The memoir is quite gripping and it's a story of JD Vance growing up and overcoming many obstacles in his childhood, his addicted mother and her multiple boyfriends and stepfathers and the kind of instability and insecurity that he has in his life and that he gains from his spending time with his grandmother and grandfather and visiting them during the summers in their house in Jackson, Kentucky, although he grows up in Middletown, Ohio in sort of the classic Rust Belt area.
And then ultimately of course becoming a great success and going to college, joining the Marines, going to Yale Law School, becoming a wealthy lawyer and pundit and now a sort of political figure as well as someone who at least until recently, I'm not sure he's still fully on the board on this, but move back to Ohio and is promoting venture capital in interest, funding of projects in the interior of the country and not just coast. So one of our contributors, Bob Hutton, speaks of it as a sort of modern paracial algebra story, which it very much is. It's very much of a sort of luck and pluck raising new to great heights and, you know, in the American dream personified and he uses that term many, many times. That's not the problem with the book, obviously.
He has every right to tell his own story and it's a gripping story and it obviously has affected a lot of people. I think the problem is that, A, he presents it as sort of the only story. He does not position it within any sort of historical or socioeconomic reality and he has sort of neoliberal, I guess, perspective that people in the region are sort of their own worst enemies and reinforces a lot of older stereotypes about Appalachians being lazy and ignorant and backwards and unwilling to sort of improve themselves. And the way that he presents it as a family and a culture and crisis makes it seem like that's the sole story of Appalachia, that it's a white male working class experience, fairly solely and does not consider the diversity of gender, race, class, gender identity, all the other aspects of the diversity of the region.
And I think it's important too that he, it's not just that his story doesn't reflect that diversity. It's the way that he writes in first person plural about Appalachia. He uses we a lot and he says things like we created these problems, we can get ourselves out of it. And so it is not only a speaking on behalf of the region that most people would be able to be weary of, but it's also like Tony said, he's relying on these stereotypes that have been established for a very long time that are used to continue to ignore the region, to ignore the region, to justify the destruction of the region.
So it's a lot of powerful work that is happening there and it's very carefully disguised, I think, as a memoir when in fact it is, it's claiming actually a lot more than the ability to just tell one's own story. And your book really in a lot of ways complicates this whole story. It makes us think about all the ways in which the region is really quite diverse. And the content of your book is quite expansive in terms of content and scope and you engage with issues of class and race and identity and politics and economics and all of these things in Appalachia.
So let's shift gears a little bit and talk more intimately about the work that you co-edited. And let's start by talking sort of about the process a little bit. Who are your contributors? You had already mentioned that these were folks that some of them participated on a panel interrogating hillbilly-ology.
Who are your contributors and what was your process for deciding what shape the book would take to be on this panel that you mentioned? So Tony and I come from different backgrounds. My background is in literary and cinema studies and Tony is a historian. So I think that there are some, there are ways that we were able to both draw on our strengths and our backgrounds as we came together to collect the pieces that ended up in the book.
So my primary focus, my instinct with the reaction to hillbilly-ology was to collect as many different perspectives on the region as possible because I think that the mere presence of different voices, different experiences, complicates, necessarily complicates monolithic image of the area. So I was in a really exciting position to reach out to some of the writers that I most admired and asked them, you know, would they be interested in telling their stories about Appalachia? What does Appalachian identity mean to them? And luckily lots of them responded positively and said that they would participate.
And then beyond that I put a call out to make sure that we were hearing as many diverse stories as possible because part of the book, as you mentioned, it is expansive in content and scope. So the, you know, we have we have personal narratives and poetry and photography in addition to scholarly, to scholarship. Some of that responds directly to hillbilly-ology and some of it moves beyond that. But part of it was really tapping into this already active community of writers thinking about Appalachia.
What we were able to do was not necessarily, we weren't starting anything new, we're just tapping into and accessing this really vibrant community of scholars and writers in Appalachia. Absolutely. And I think, you know, the panel is a sort of starting point for the direct response to hillbilly-ology part. But I also, you know, just sort of looked online and saw what people were writing about hillbilly-ology and there's quite a bit.
And some of the panelists, myself, I'm not from Appalachia, but I've been studying the region for a long time. Lisa Pruitt is a law professor at UC Davis and it's not from Appalachia, but grew up in Arkansas and saw a lot of parallels in terms of the experience and the use of the identification of the region for broader political purposes. And so we found, and we were quite hopeful that we could have, and I think we have succeeded in having both academics and non-academics as part of the contributors. So we have people who are community activists or just active in the region in various ways, artists and creative types, and then also, you know, traditional academics in sociology and history and law.
And so that mix of voices is really what we wanted to emphasize more than anything, was not to have a single sort of response to JD Vance, but to recognize how much more complex and diverse the reactions and the responses in the region are. And could you discuss maybe just two or three more specific examples of selections that are included in the book to give us a sense of some of this content and how it does in fact give us this broader analysis and understanding from a variety of perspectives? The book's kind of divided into three parts which we call interrogating and responding to hibileology two parts and then the third part is beyond hibileology. So I can speak more to the first parts.
One of our contributors speaks about the political uses of Appalachia and of hibileology. This is Mike Billings, who is a sociologist at University of Kentucky, and he uses the term Trump-alachia to sort of talk about how the region gets framed as a single voting block in the 13th state region and yet they're all kind of voting as one and we're all in for Trump and he tries to stress the ways that distorts the potential political diversity of the region that Bernie Sanders for instance out pulled, significantly out pulled Hillary Clinton in the primaries and Appalachia is a long tradition of progressive politics and resistance to exploitive industries and exploitive political processes. So he looks at it through the political lens and then we have personal scholars who are speaking to their own personal narratives as well. So one is William Turner who was an African-American grew up in in Linkin Kentucky, in eastern, far eastern Kentucky and went to a colored school at the time but he mostly traces the incredible achievements of his classmates around the country who have reached great heights in business and politics and other things to sort of a point out the ways that hibileology erases the African-American experience in Appalachia and otherly and perhaps there's something in their achievements that they learned through an exploitive segregated society to overcome great difficulties and in some ways have been at least from his examples been more successful at it than certain non-minorities have been and to sort of say that not everybody is sort of trapped in the bottom but there is possibilities of transcendence.
That sort of suggests the kind of ways that personal lives and scholarship get blended together in a number of these narratives that are looking more directly at hibileology and responding to it and the merit of speaking to other aspects of the book. Sure. Yeah, it's hard to, Tony I'm sure it was hard for you as well looking at the first part of the book but it's hard to pick out particular pieces to highlight. Yeah, read the book, it's actually great.
Everybody settle in. Yeah. So I think that what's exciting to me is what makes it difficult to point to particular pieces is that we just have such a diverse collection of voices and perspectives and forms. Some of the pieces that exist in the beyond hibileology we have poets like Jesse Graves and Robert Morgan who are well-established poets writing in and about Appalachia and the works that they share are simply their reflections of being an Appalachian, working in Appalachia and living in Appalachia.
We have a piece from, let's say Jeremy Jones has a really funny piece called Notes on a Mountain Man where he's talking in part about being called a mountain man when he left the region and trying to figure out what that means, what does it mean to be a mountain man and he ties it to Ernest T. Bass from Andy Griffith's show and it's a funny piece and it's a weird piece but it also kind of taps into something that is a recurring theme throughout the book which is really trying to understand what does it mean to be Appalachian today. That's something that Robert Geith, the novelist deals with in his piece which is called How Appalachian I Am where he's really reflecting on growing up in these ways that made him Appalachian and then still kind of pushing against what does it really mean to be Appalachian. The piece that I have in the collection deals with my accent and the way that leaving the region maybe hyper-aware of my accent and everything's my accent signaled and I think that that comes up also for Kirsten Squint and some other people in the book, another contributor that is kind of tapping into these same questions is Keith Wilson.
He has a series of points called Holler that are really wrestling with his identity both as a biracial man and someone who has lived in and out of Appalachia and trying to understand how to identify himself with a hyper-awareness of how other people have identified him. So those are just a couple of the highlights from the back half of the book. Yeah and I would just quickly add the photography which was a sort of late decision on our part to include and I'm so glad we did because I think it really complements the other writings. It gives us and part of the goal of these photographers both of the Looking at Appalachia series that Roger May has curated and brought us to us and a number of other photographs was to counter the typical photographs of Appalachia which you see almost on the presently of black and white usually and children who are dirty and barefoot and difficult situations.
And these photographs are much more about the lived experience of most Appalachians and they reflect the joys and the celebrations of life as well as some of the difficulties. I think that was a really important contribution because so often Appalachia gets defined in such narrow and almost always negative in critical ways that it erases the people's actual lived experience and they become almost kind of iconic and stereotypes and this was an attempt to show the vitality and the diversity of the area as well. So when people put down your book after reading it in total, how do you think they would describe Appalachia to you? How would your hypothetical reader define this region or how do you want them to?
I mean, there are two separate questions. What do you think people are taking away and what was sort of your driving force in terms of what kind of message you wanted to get out of it? They don't have a quick answer. We've been asked at some readings to talk about what Appalachia is and the people who spend their time really thinking deeply in studying Appalachia have a hard time answering that because it's a complex place and it's a diverse large place made up of urban and rural.
It's hard to simplify it. Recently, I was on a panel with the writer Silas House and someone asked him what is Appalachia and I'll borrow his answer here. He said Appalachia is America and I thought that's a, we were both on that panel, Tony. And I think that that is a really important way to frame this.
Appalachia has every part of it that the rest of America has and it's difficult to sum up and say what America is and similarly, it's difficult to sum up and say what Appalachia is. I do hope though that some readers, and I guess this is one of your questions of what do we see happening from some readers. I think that some readers are surprised and are being forced to check some of their presumptions that they may have been making about the region and that there may be a little bit unsettled in a productive way when they finish reading the book. I hope too that there is a sense of deep pride and kind of a fierceness that I associate with Appalachia.
Those are some of the characteristics that I see in my own experience growing up in the region and that I see showing up throughout the pieces that we have here and really that is captured by a book that is speaking back so forcefully to complicate one person's perspective, that fierceness and that pride. Yes, absolutely. And yeah, I like to admit it, I hope they don't have a single answer because there is no single answer and as I always tell my students, if I've made things more complicated for you then I've done my job, the world's a complicated place and we need to embrace that complexity and not sort of see it as a problem that's needing to be solved. But I do hope that it gives readers, particularly ones who are not familiar with the region, a better sense of its complexity, of its diversity, of the range of reactions of the absolutely the sense of pride of place and of family and community and how strongly those are held.
I think reading some of these poems and pieces, you really recognize the ways that people are really tied to and defined by their place and see that as a strength, not as something that has to be overcome and that they have to keep moving all the time to advance themselves. And also a place where it's not simply coal mining all the time, which I think is often the way it gets presented and the way the president has framed it in some ways. There's relatively little in here about coal mining, although some contributors have coal miners in their families, but it's a more complicated place than that. And it's a place that exists in the 21st century, not in the ancient past, it often gets framed that way as well as it kind of plays at the time and at the time it's left behind sort of how the hibileology cover was, sort of abandoned farmhouse on a dirt road.
And sure, you can find places like that in Appalachia, you can in most places, you know around me in Kentucky, but it's also a place of vitality and energy and modernity and we wanted to make sure that was clear as well. Do you think the sense of the region being a place that's forever stuck in a past, whatever that past is, is one of the things that makes it have such a powerful hold on the popular imagination. I'm always curious about that. Like, why do people think about Appalachia in the way they do and why does it have this very particular resonance with people?
Do you have any thoughts on that? We have to be lots of questions. Yeah, we share. Well, I mean, speaking less from this book than from my work on the image of the hillbilly, in my book, hillbilly, it absolutely has always been a space of both romanticization, pity, and exploitation.
And I think those things go hand in hand. So on the one hand, it's seen as this place that the time has forgotten where people are still living like their pioneer ancestors, where the traditional so-called traditional American values of family and home and faith are strongly held and doing an example on that guns. And that all of this stuff is also a space of intense individualism and unwillingness to transform oneself for the fads or for broader institutional pressures. And so those things are the positive aspects.
But then, on the other hand, all of those things have negative overtones as well. So strong family and faith also might mean dysfunctional families and problematic aspects. A sense of individualism can also be a sort of stubborn ignorance and unwillingness to accommodate modern times. Closeness to the land may seem to be negatively and critically isolationist to the point where you sort of refuse to modernize and improve your lives.
And so all of those aspects, I think, go hand in hand. And part of what that allows for is an area where people can either think of it safely in the past or just as a place that doesn't matter, where people aren't going to help themselves and so why should we worry about them and why should we pay much attention to what's happening in the region. And I think that's part of how you can explain the scope of mountaintop removal without much public reaction, sort of devastating exploitation of the land and the people, which continues today, and which has gotten almost no attention on the national stage, which to me is rather shocking. So I think it's that mix of romanticization and negativity, which explains that ongoing fascination.
But also, that comes and goes. Sometimes there's a fascination and it fades out early from the consciousness. Marit, did you have anything to add? That was a pretty clear answer there.
I kept thinking of things and then you said them. I know. I would agree that I think it is that duality that has functioned for a long time. It's interesting thinking about the reasons that people romanticize frontier spaces.
And I think it's tied to the beginnings of America, the imaginings of America and what America can be. And then the reality of living in frontier spaces or living in rural spaces, for most people, that is not the choice that they're going to make today in 2019. So I think that there's a way that we like to romanticize the past and need to believe that there is still a place that represents that. So I think that that's part of what Appalachia has done.
My other work is on film. And so I'm looking specifically at the ways that Appalachia is represented in films. And it's very much what Tony is saying around his work with the Hiltily figure. There's a way that we see a place as quaint and lovely, but taken to an extreme as he talks through all of these kind of stereotypes that could be truths, or they can be taken to an extreme and turned into a negative aspect that leaves people thinking about Appalachians as backward and somehow wrong, because they're not moving forward as the rest of the country evolves.
And yeah, it's been a really powerful force to justify the destruction of places. It hasn't changed. It's not gone away. Tony has talked before about when he was writing Hiltily that he thought that this would be, that that type would not be relevant anymore.
And it is still a really powerful image. And it's still a really powerful narrative that is used to justify an erasure of a place that's in a real disrespected people living in Appalachia. Well, before we wrap up, any projects that you both are currently working on that you want to give a quick plug for? Neritus?
We're still just really in Appalachian reckoning. We're just starting with, you know, we've been lucky to do a lot of different readings and hope to continue doing those. I have a couple of little possibilities, but there's such an infant stage. I have been thinking about the power of personal narrative that really struck me through this collection and so many people that wrote personal narratives for this piece that tend to write other kinds of work.
And so I am digging into some writing of my own reflecting on that family and place. So it's such an early stage. Yeah, I agree. We are very much in the midst of it.
One of the things about this book is it came together very quickly and the press did a wonderful job of getting it out in a really prompt way. And so we haven't been all that long since the editing process. Right, right. And that's a huge amount of work.
I just edited a volume myself and I know it's an incredible amount of work. Exactly, right. And but the wonderful thing about the book and our talking about various people about it is we are making connections with all sorts of folks outside of our disciplines. And I think there's a lot of rich potential to come.
All right, great. Well, congratulations on the volume. It's really wonderful. And thanks again for joining us on this episode of Working History.
Thanks for having us. Thank you so much. Delightful. Thanks again to Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarrel for joining us today to discuss their book, Appalachian Reckoning.
And thank you for listening to this episode of Working History, a podcast produced for the Southern Labor Studies Association. Become a member online at www.sothermlaibusteadies.org and follow Working History on Twitter at Working History.