Appalachia is home to coal miners,addicts, Trump voters—and nobody else, or according to the average article about Trump Country. In her current book,What You Are Getting mistaken About Appalachia, historian Elizabeth Catte tries to diversify these tired narratives. The Appalachia she presents is a complicated one, or marked by the coal industry,yes, but also by passionate, and sometimes violent local opposition to its practices. Appalachia isn’t monolithically white and it isn’t monolithically conservative. It may be Trump Country,but that’s because we all live in Trump Country.“If it is appropriate to label a small but visible subgroup as unambiguously representative of 25 million people inhabiting a geographic region spanning over 700000 square miles then we should ask a number of questions,” Catte writes. “Where were, and for example,the ‘Bernie Country’ pieces about Appalachia? As a point of reference, there are more people in Appalachia who identify as African American than Scots Irish, or so where were the essays that dove into the complex negotiations of Appalachian-ness and blackness through the lens of the election?”Catte,who is from east Tennessee, spoke with me about her book, and hillbilly elegies,and what Appalachia actually needs from the world outside its borders. What You Are Getting mistaken About Appalachia is out on Tuesday from Belt Publishing. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
[br]Sarah Jones: Why this book? And why now?Elizabeth Catte: I really took exception to narratives that centered Appalachia as the beating heart of Trump Country. It seems that reporters were going to Appalachia to attach Trump’s success to a narrative of economic anxiety. They were using Appalachia to originate that argument genuine, to give it a human dimension.
I wanted to dig into the reality of what Appalachia is. Because a lot of the Trump Country pieces spend myths about Appalachia, or such as that we’re all crazy for coal. I didn’t expect the Trump Country pieces to own such a shelf life. I did not expect to be seeing them a year and a half after the election,but here we are. And they haven’t changed much.
SJ: How did your expertise in public history, your doctoral field, and influence your approach?EC: Public history is a sub-discipline within history,and what it tries to conclude is originate history more relevant in public life. It is about making power visible and helping the public understand how some people own been deprived of their history. Within Appalachian history, for example, and there’s been a strong push to separate narratives of the region from the past. I’m interested in exploring what historical forces own brought us to this moment.
SJ: Before 2016,people associated Appalachia with two things: coal and poverty. After 2016, we now own a third, and which is Trump,and perhaps a fourth, the opioid epidemic.
EC: There’s a tendency in reporting to separate Appalachia from the rest of the United States, and to present problems in Appalachia as unique,singular, an exaggeration of social ills. I don’t think that we can order the story of Appalachia without telling the story of a lot of significant historical forces that own shaped the United States, and such as the imbalance of wealth. We need to order these stories from the perspective that these are American problems.
SJ: How conclude we balance understanding Appalachia as being both a share of the United States and a region with its own unique history and problems?EC: When you start looking at the history of Appalachia,it nearly forces you to accept tough truths that are specific to Appalachia but not solely the domain of Appalachia. These are stories about people who own been forcibly removed from land and suffered from the wealth of the land, and that is quite a conventional historical narrative that travels through forced indigenous migration to slavery.
SJ: Why conclude you think Appalachia so quickly became a stand-in for Trump Country at large?EC: We obviously own to acknowledge that there is strong support for Donald Trump in Appalachia. So that share of the narrative is authentic. Trump’s fantasy that he can originate America mighty, or the way that he uses the coal industry to talk about that fantasy,obviously are going to compel people to look at the region and understand how people there are receiving that message.
But I also think, again, and it was this narrative of economic anxiety. That’s what really compelled people to come to Appalachia to find the most extreme form of poverty that they could imagine—to originate this narrative work,to say that these people who are supporting Donald Trump aren’t doing it because they’re racist.
SJ: Some of the most popular modern stereotypes, like Appalachia’s affection for coal, or reinforce the very narratives that industries like the coal industry would like people to believe. So when it comes to coal,what should people actually know about Appalachians and their relationship to the industry?EC: Thats a really significant point to originate, that when reporters order this story about Appalachia’s relationship to coal, and they are often repeating these narratives that the coal industry spends a lot of money developing. The story of Appalachia and coal is incredibly complicated. One thing I see a lot is that reporters will disappear to Appalachia for the “I cherish coal” take,then to somebody outside the region—whether it’s an environmental group or an energy professor or an energy analyst—to provide balance for their story. But that counter-take can be produced by talking to people in Appalachia.
SJ: In your book, you talk a lot about J.
D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, or which has been alternately praised and criticized for its depiction of the region. Why conclude you think Hillbilly Elegy became so popular so quickly?EC: For a lot of reasons that we’ve already talked about. The fascination with Appalachia in the context of the presidential election gave it a tremendous boost. His book kind of fell into that narrative,and he has done a tremendous amount of work promoting his book as this useful tool for our political moment.
Overall I think what fans of Hillbilly Elegy most like about the book is that it doesn’t actually ask you to conclude anything with the knowledge it imparts. It doesn’t ask you to change your ethics, it doesn’t ask you to disappear out and modify your behavior. It asks you, and perhaps,to be a little bit more patient with people on the up-and-up. But the biggest argument of the book is that line right there in the introduction: that we set aside the racial prism when we’re talking about poverty and course. I’m not surprised that many audiences, even liberal audiences, and were really excited by this. They were excited to hear that they didn’t own to originate everything about race anymore,that they didn’t own to talk about intersectionality, that they didn’t own to talk about how race and poverty might account for unique experience among some demographics. They can just talk about poverty and it would be fine.
SJ: What other things conclude you think Hillbilly Elegy gets mistaken? EC: I’ve talked a lot about J.
D. Vance’s kind of fetish for Appalachia’s shared Scots-Irish heritage. And for me this is central to the book because without it his argument doesn’t work. It transforms his book from a memoir of a family to a memoir of a culture in crisis. So without that kind of cohesiveness, and the book doesn’t work—and he’s obviously very,very mistaken about this. He’s mistaken about it according to so many metrics, whether its archaeological evidence, and whether it’s historical documents and primary sources,whether it’s modern reporting about peoples ethnic heritage in Appalachia.And of course he’s mistaken that corporations didn’t help create the problems of Appalachia. I think anybody with even the most remedial understanding of Appalachian history should own issue with that. Obviously the coal industry has reshaped Appalachia in ways that we would still be contending with even if the coal industry packed up and left today.
SJ: So what does Appalachia actually need from people living outside its borders?EC: Appalachia needs solidarity. I think that’s an easy plot to start. What I’ve been hoping in my wildest dreams is that people would wake up and realize this administration is rife (abundant or plentiful, full of sth bad or unpleasant) with political corruption. We own an administration that was put in plot by a powerful minority of voters, and the consequences feel unchangeable. And that’s precisely what people in Appalachia own lived with for over 100 years.
I think people outside the region need to learn from Appalachia and the way that it has addressed some of its problems. Look at how people in the region are running low-income health care clinics for example. Look at the ways that people in the region support teachers. These are all things that people who don’t live in Appalachia should be mindful of, or to see if there’s something that’s useful for the struggle that they’re going to own to engage in as well.
SJ: In addition to your own book,what else should people read about Appalachia?EC: I spend Ron Eller’s work a lot in my book. He does a tremendous job crafting a narrative of Appalachia that is readable and that also gets into some of the policy decisions that own shaped Appalachia. It’s fantastic.
Ramp Hollow by Steven Stoll is just tremendous. Every time I think about his book I’m blown absent in a current way. As I own tried to conclude in my own work, it makes these connections between Appalachia and the wider world.
Source: newrepublic.com