Appalachian reckoning : a region responds to Hillbilly Elegy

Appalachian reckoning A region responds to Hillbilly Elegy

Book - 2019

"With hundreds of thousands of copies sold, a Ron Howard movie in the works, and the rise of its author as a media personality, J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis has defined Appalachia for much of the nation. What about Hillbilly Elegy accounts for this explosion of interest during this period of political turmoil? Why have its ideas raised so much controversy? And how can debates about the book catalyze new, more inclusive political agendas for the region's future? Appalachian Reckoning is a retort, at turns rigorous, critical, angry, and hopeful, to the long shadow Hillbilly Elegy has cast over the region and its imagining. But it also moves beyond Hillbilly Elegy to allow Appalachian...s from varied backgrounds to tell their own diverse and complex stories through an imaginative blend of scholarship, prose, poetry, and photography. The essays and creative work collected in Appalachian Reckoning provide a deeply personal portrait of a place that is at once culturally rich and economically distressed, unique and typically American. Complicating simplistic visions that associate the region almost exclusively with death and decay, Appalachian Reckoning makes clear Appalachia's intellectual vitality, spiritual richness, and progressive possibilities."--Back cover.

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Subjects
Vance, J. D. > Hillbilly elegy.
Appalachians (People) > Social life and customs.
Appalachian Region > Social conditions.
Appalachian Region > Economic conditions.
Published
Morgantown : West Virginia University Press 2019.
Language
English
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
ix, 421 pages : illustrations ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9781946684790
9781946684783
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: Why This Book?
  • Part I. Considering Hillbilly Elegy
  • Interrogating
  • Hillbilly Elitism
  • Social Capital
  • Once Upon a Time in "Trumpalachia": Hillbilly Elegy, Personal Choice, and the Blame Game
  • Stereotypes on the Syllabus: Exploring Hillbilly Elegy's Use as an Instructional Text at Colleges and Universities
  • Benham, Kentucky, Coal Miner
  • Wise County, Virginia, Landscape
  • Panning for Gold: A Reflection of Life from Appalachia
  • Will the Real Hillbilly Please Stand Up? Urban Appalachian Migration and Culture Seen through the Lens of Hillbilly Elegy
  • What Hillbilly Elegy Reveals about Race in Twenty-First-Century America
  • Prisons Are Not Innovation
  • Down and Out in Middletown and Jackson: Drugs, Dependency, and Decline in J. D. Vance's Capitalist Realism
  • Responding
  • Keep Your "Elegy": The Appalachia I Know Is Very Much Alive
  • He Said/SHE Said
  • The Hillbilly Miracle and the Fall
  • Elegies
  • In Defense of J. D. Vance
  • It's Crazy Around Here, I Don't Know What to Do about It, and I'm Just a Kid
  • "Falling in Love," Balsam Bald, the Blue Ridge Parkway, 1982
  • Black Hillbillies Have No Time for Elegies
  • Part II. Beyond Hillbilly Elegy
  • Nothing Familiar
  • History
  • Tether and Plow
  • On and On: Appalachian Accent and Academic Power
  • Olivia's Ninth Birthday Party
  • Kentucky, Coming and Going
  • Resistance, or Our Most Worthy Habits
  • Notes on a Mountain Man
  • These Stories Sustain Me: The WYRD-ness of My Appalachia
  • Watch Children
  • The Mower-1933
  • Consolidate and Salvage
  • How Appalachian I Am
  • Aunt Rita along the King Coal Highway, Mingo County, West Virginia
  • Holler
  • Loving to Fool with Things
  • Antebellum Cookbook
  • How to Make Cornbread, or Thoughts on Being an Appalachian from Pennsylvania Who Calls Virginia Home but Now Lives in Georgia
  • Tonglen for My Mother
  • Olivia at the Intersection
  • Appalachian Apophenia, or The Psychogeography of Home
  • Canary Dirge
  • Poet, Priest, and "Poor White Trash"
  • List of Contributors
  • Sources and Permissions
  • Index
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

This impassioned collection of Appalachian regional art, essays, and poetry responds directly to J.D. Vance's bestselling memoir about an impoverished family awash in crassness, violence, and drug abuse. Each writer or photographer seeks to provide either a counterpoint to Vance's story or to demonstrate that not all Appalachians are uneducated hillbillies. Appalachian intellectuals such as T.R.C. Hutton, William H. Turner, and Lisa R. Pruitt delve into intricate stories about race, education, and post-coal migration, exploring both the identity of the white "hillbilly" and the black Appalachians virtually ignored in Elegy. Some essays combine statistics with personal stories of hardship, compassion, and perseverance; others hew to a conversational account of the author's family. Lou Murrey's photograph of diverse people protesting a federal prison in Kentucky and Roger May's stunning portrait of his aunt serve as a striking counterpoint to Elegy's depiction of an apathetic people. Vance's belief that Appalachians committed themselves to failure loses traction when faced with these accounts of historical context, company towns, and current positive developments. As the editors Harkins and McCarroll note, while Vance offers one bleak "window" into the extensive multistate region, this valuable collection shows resilience, hope, and belonging are in Appalachia, too. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Appalachian writers and scholars rebut the "gross simplifications and stereotypes" of J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy (2016).Often cited as a way to understand the working-class voters who helped elect Donald Trump, Hillbilly Elegy has been a longtime bestseller, will soon become an HBO movie, and has made Vance a media expert on Appalachia. Indeed, it is the most widely read book on the region. Now comes this thoughtful and provocative anthology of essays, poems, and photographs arguing for treatment of Appalachia as a "diverse and complex place." Edited by Harkins (History/Western Kentucky Univ.; Hillbilly: A Cultural History of an American Icon, 2003) and McCarroll (Writing and Rhetoric/Bowdoin Coll.; Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film, 2018), the book ranges widely in its single focus, with contributors variously attacking, defending, or simply critiquing the book. All deem Hillbilly a biased work reinforcing stereotypes of the region's people (snake handlers, mountain men), as understood by a conservative Kentuckian born into a poor, unstable family who pulled himself up by his bootstraps, attended Yale Law School, and became a venture capitalist. The result, writes Tennessee historian T.R.C. Hutton, is "a Silicon Valley millionaire [who] is now the most popular source for understanding twenty-first century rural poverty." In other pieces, Kentucky sociologist Dwight B. Billings calls the memoir an ad for "capitalist neoliberalism," and California law professor Lisa Pruitt, who is "from hillbilly stock," finds it reminiscent of her childhood but filled with "ill-informed policy prescriptions." Like others, she believes systemic societal problemsnot only personal choice and accountabilityhelp shape regional life. Vance's defenders say he is entitled to his personal story and to his interpretation of his early social environment. Writer Ivy Brashear, a 10th-generation Appalachian, notes that the book lacks class, heart, and warmth. Others offer nuanced considerations of race, sexuality, and drug use.A welcome and valuable resource for anyone studying or writing about this much-maligned region. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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