Appalachian Reckoning : a Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy /
edited by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll
- Morgantown : West Virginia University Press, (c)2019.
- 1 online resource (x, 423 pages) : illustrations
Includes bibliographies and index.
Introduction: Why this book? / Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll. 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 / T.R.C. Hutton -- Jeff Mann -- Dwight B. Billings -- Elizabeth Catte -- Theresa Burriss -- Ricardo Nazario y Colón -- Roger Guy -- Lisa R. Pruitt -- Lou Murrey -- Travis Linnemann and Corina Medley -- Ivy Brashear -- Crystal Good -- Michael E. Maloney -- Dana Wildsmith -- Kelli Hansel Haywood -- Allen Johnson -- Danielle Dulken -- William H. Turner. 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" / Jesse Graves -- Jesse Graves -- Jesse Graves -- Meredith McCarroll -- Rebecca Kiger -- Kirstin L. Squint -- Richard Hague -- Jeremy B. Jones -- Edward Karshner -- Luke Travis -- Robert Morgan -- Chelsea Jack -- Robert Gipe -- Roger May -- Keith S. Wilson -- Rachel Wise -- Kelly Norman Ellis -- Jim Minick -- Linda Parsons -- Meg Wilson -- Jodie Childers -- Dale Marie Prenatt -- Elizabeth Hadaway.
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 Appalachians 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.