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Interrupting the Myth: A Review of Elizabeth Catte’s “What You are Getting Wrong About Appalachia” (the Editors)

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte

Published 2/6/18 by Belt Publishing

146 Pages

In What You are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, public historian Elizabeth Catte, who hails from Eastern Tennessee, is very angry and out to disprove pernicious misconceptions about the region she feels so tied to. When you are from a certain region, be it Appalachia or the Rust Belt, you know that there are an unlimited amount of perspectives and narratives that exist within that region. It can’t be reduced to some easily digestible narrative that reduces the multiplicity of stories and peoples into one homogenous bloc, a narrative that is typically consumed by urban cosmopolitans who exist in a “higher,” more enlightened realm than those who dwell in Appalachia or the Rust Belt. Catte is out to deconstruct these myths and common misconceptions that are used to define and explain Appalachia to cosmopolitan elites. It is a work of interrupting and deconstructing specific myths which are operative in our culture that tend to benefit certain people in power who aren’t from Appalachia at the expense of the people who are purported to be represented in these narratives and characterizations.

As Catte points out, there was a revived interest in Appalachia leading up to the 2016 election. Donald Trump was a monstrous figure to liberals and “Never Trump” conservatives alike. He violated generally accepted rules of decorum and civility, and appealed to the hopes and dreams of people from certain “forgotten” regions of the country that are typically glossed over. One is reminded of the infamous “flyover country” New Yorker cover: from the perspective of New York, the center of American culture, there isn’t much that exists outside of their own bubble when looking West, except for a few notable spots like Chicago and Los Angeles. While Appalachia isn’t on the cover of the magazine, it’s certainly one of the spots that would be glanced over. Or, to take it one step further, Appalachia wouldn’t merely be glossed over: it would be, according to Catte, highlighted as being “other” to America. It’s not even on the same level as the rest of flyover country.

In any case, a sudden interest in Appalachia from cosmopolitan, educated, and mostly elite liberals emerged leading up to the 2016 election. Trump just kept on gaining steam, and it didn’t make sense to liberals how somebody like Trump could possibly be gaining the support he was garnering. They needed to find and study these Trump supporters, who, whether from Appalachia or the Deep South, were certainly not visible to liberals in their day-to-day lives. The forgotten America needed to be remembered and put under a microscope if Trump was to be truly reckoned with.

Hence, the introduction of pieces chronicling, as Catte dubs it, “Trump Country,” which in many cases meant Appalachia. These articles popped up everywhere, from Vanity Fair to the New Yorker. The goal of the press in these pieces leading up to the election, as Catte describes in the introduction, was “to analyze what it presented as the extraordinary and singular pathologies of Appalachians, scolding audiences to get out of their bubbles and embrace empathy with the “forgotten America” before its residents elected Donald Trump.” After the election, commentators gave up on Appalachia, proclaiming that they could “reap what they had sown.” But the main problem with all of these pieces, to Catte, wasn’t necessarily that the attention given to Appalachia by the press was disingenuous, but rather that they deliberately portrayed Appalachia as a monolithic region of people sharing the same ethnicity and heritage with certain essential characteristics, which were presented as “other” to any characteristics someone from anywhere else in the country might have, in order to explain the region’s behavior. Appalachia became a scientific object of study, to be dissected and understood by educated elites, without any sort of concern for the people themselves. If they were to show empathy to Appalachians, it wasn’t about solidarity with people who, while not exactly the same as non-Appalachians, largely had similar problems in regard to economic exploitation and, yes, even identity politics (as Catte rightly points out, many of the problems that seem uniquely Appalachian are in fact shared universally throughout the rest of the country). Liberals showed empathy to the extent that they could perhaps keep Trump from getting elected by showing Trump Country residents that the Democrats, if they could just look at things from a rational rather than emotional point of view, were the ones who truly represented their interests.

Catte’s book comes as a response to this renewed national interest in Appalachia, and proclaims that there are two main objectives to her study. On the one hand, she aims to uncover who is benefitting from the popular narratives told about Appalachia while she is simultaneously poking holes in those narratives. On the other hand, she makes it a point to highlight and celebrate the people whose voices are almost universally omitted from the discourse surrounding Appalachia. She discusses people who have done noteworthy and heroic things who aren’t white, Scots-Irish, coal miners. There is actually a rich tradition of activism and community organizing in Appalachia that carries on into the present, and their concerns aren’t always related to coal. Further, as Catte reminds us over and over again, many of these people are Hispanic, African-American, and female. If J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, is allowed to remake Appalachia in his own image for specific purposes, then so is Catte, who writes, “This (her) image of Appalachia does not deflect the problems of the region but simply recognizes the voices and actions of those who have struggled against them, often sacrificing their health, comfort, and even their lives.”

The book is divided up into three parts. Part one, “Appalachia and the Making of Trump Country,” is about the renewed interest in Appalachia leading up to and after the 2016 election. One of the most interesting points in the book is that if there actually was a genuine interest from the national public to learn about Appalachia, why is it that there was only one media narrative being produced and consumed? As Catte points out, “If it is appropriate to label a small but visible subgroup as unambiguously representative of 25 million people inhabiting a geographic region spanning over 700,000 square miles, then we should as a number of questions: Where were the “Bernie Country” pieces about Appalachia? There are more people in Appalachia who identify as African American than Scots-Irish, so where were the essays that dove into the complex negotiations of Appalachian-ness and blackness through the lens of the election?” The list goes on.

Part two, Hillbilly Elegy and the Racial Baggage of J.D. Vance’s ‘Greater Appalachia,’” discusses perhaps the most blatant example of misrepresenting Appalachia, a misrepresentation that directly contributes loads and loads of money to the pockets of the one doing the misrepresenting, namely Vance himself. Of course, Vance became famous due to the publication of his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, which was voraciously consumed by people outside of Appalachia as a way to understand the essence of Appalachian decay. The point Vance makes that Catte takes special exception to is his description of Appalachia being made up of a homogenous bloc of poor, white, Scots-Irish people, who, being part of the white working class, should be treated as a unique minority in their own right. The danger of Vance’s discourse is that we can brush off a discussion of race and identity politics at the expense of class politics. Part of Catte’s point is that we shouldn’t sacrifice one form of analysis for the other: they are both important. Furthermore, it is inherently problematic that Vance can be purported to represent an entire region in the national political discourse. As Catte quotes Vance as saying to the Washington Post, “It’s an indictment of our media culture that a group that includes tens of millions of people is effectively represented by one guy. I feel sort of uncomfortable being that guy.” But Catte rightly points out, he can’t be that uncomfortable being that guy, given how much he has personally benefitted from his status as a man both above and of Appalachia, able to translate their problems to cosmopolitan elites in order to make them easier to understand. To be honest, though, I don’t see Vance as being intentionally malicious or deceitful. Rather, it is, as Catte says, inherently problematic who gets to have the privilege of being an authority on a specific topic or region. Their views have a huge impact on public perception and indeed reality itself, and there are great benefits to be had for the one with this power.

Finally, part three, “Land, Justice, People,” tells the stories of, for the most part, present day activists and community organizers in Appalachia who both don’t fit in to the conventional stereotypes about Appalachians and who are rarely covered by the media. Catte discusses topics and people such as the Highlander School, a project by a local radio station to connect prisoners to their loved ones through “audio postcards,” the continued battle for Blair Mountain, and present-day organizers using tactics learned from their anti-coal predecessors to protest different things, like the prison-industrial complex. Through telling these stories, Catte makes the point that there are a ton of people and narratives in Appalachia that don’t conform to the traditional myths and narratives that are used to portray it, and these could be the bases for very different stories about Appalachia. This section is about solidarity, and directly counters the books and articles by figures like Vance.

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia reminds us that the fight over representation has huge implications concerning power, both culturally and politically. It is impossible to paint a complete portrait of any portion of reality, whether it be a group of people or a region. But that doesn’t stop people from both doing so and making impactful decisions based on these portraits. This phenomenon is why a book like Catte’s is so essential. It is a very practical form of deconstruction that pokes holes in the operative myths and narratives that define Appalachia and determine how those in power make decisions concerning it. It has the power to make these conventional narratives less dangerous, and can potentially lead to the promotion of narratives that are less homogenous. This book is an act of resistance, both as a work of deconstruction and positive assertion of different narratives that get no coverage. On top of that, it is also an easily digestible but well researched cultural history and genealogy of how a region has come to be defined over time. It is very practical knowledge, and makes the larger, crucial point that we should be conscious of the myths and narratives that underlie our political and cultural discourse.

Written by the Editors

Images

Cover of the book, taken from its Amazon page.

Cover of the March 29 1976 issue of the New Yorker, from this link.

From Roger May’s “Looking at Appalachia” project. Dennis Savage. May 24, 2015. Cabell County, West Virginia.

Purchase the book here.

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the river (Jeremy Bendik-Keymer w/Misty Morrison)

For half a year, we’ve met to consider the loss of moral relationships. We meet every two weeks, give or take a week if events intervene. It’s usually Sunday night. Tonight, it’s Saturday, because tomorrow night is my father’s 82nd birthday. Our preferred place is Prosperity Social Club back by the iron-keg fire. Tonight, we’re at Banter by the open window in the back room, Detroit shore-way outside in a state of reconstruction. Once we met at the Bottlehouse, but the crowd was loud and we were not feeling it. It was New Year’s Eve on the early side. Another time, we met at Le Petit Triangle, almost no one there – just a couple under a low-hanging lamp and then, right before we left, a group of four celebrating something with a bottle of champagne. Sometimes, all we do is talk; sometimes we write in silence and then read what we wrote out loud to each other; and sometimes Misty sketches. Once we exchanged notebooks and wrote in each other’s notebooks down half the page, column-ing. We’re clueless about what we are doing, but we look forward to it, each meeting.

How did we decide to start this practice and what is the purpose of it, really? We started because we had been visited by Kyle Powys Whyte in October. He gave the Beamer-Schneider Lecture in Ethics & Civics at Case Western Reserve University. He lectured about what it is to preserve a future that is indigenous and explained his concept of “collective continuance.” At the heart of his lecture was the idea of seasonal forms of sovereignty -a notion completely foreign to modern European thought about the state. With each season and each different ecological niche, a different form of sovereignty, led by different elders in the community, should take hold for the nations (formerly) of the Great Lakes (with populations forcibly relocated out West over a century ago). To lead in these regimes, the leaders of the season have to show that they can uphold many moral relationships -of trust, utility, reciprocity, honor, care, and respect. Braidings of relationship spread out from seasonal rotations in shifting ecologies matched by shifting economies, with distributed role structures fit to each. I was left following his visit feeling the poverty of moral relationships in neoliberal capitalism, itself settler colonial, and told Misty about it.

We’d been involved in a project at SPACES Gallery on the right to safety. The artist Michael Rakowitz had been coming to town to urge white people in Cleveland to abandon the color orange as a gesture of solidarity with Tamir Rice who held a toy gun with the orange tip removed. He saw the ritual as a way of focusing on the unequal and unjust distribution of the right to safety. As we all know, black and white, the distribution is toward white people and wealthier neighborhoods, away from black bodies and lower-income neighborhoods. These neighborhoods were formerly red-lined in Cleveland, creating what is today a “space of urban violation” – as my class on environmental politics coined the term – not just a space of “urban violence.” Rakowitz and SPACES want to draw attention to the distribution of safety by reallocating orange from mostly white, male, CIS, and wealthy-enough people’s lives to SPACES Gallery this summer. There, surrounded by this displaced privilege, people can talk about what it all means and how it feels to have a city where safety is part of life for all.

The project was, to Misty and me, an enactment of the loss of moral relationships in our society, including when ambivalently classy arts institutions and their heralds of art are funded, situated to relate to impoverished and racialized communities from out of areas like “Hingetown” (the deliberately marketed name of an intensively “bro-ifying” part of Ohio City (“bro-ifying” is anthropologist Shannon Lee Dawdy’s name for the precursor to gentrification in many U.S. cities attracting Millennials)). The project was folded around itself multiple times, seeking relationships yet always coming up against race and class, i.e., the space of colonial violation in the United States of America.

SPACES, an institution we like especially for its public educational gestures and programs, is in a tough spot, like most arts institutions, it seems. And it endeavors spiritedly to overcome its limitations and to serve the public in Cleveland. The project with Rakowitz, like Whyte visiting a private educational institution built on the vast monies of Cleveland industrialization and a settler colonial geography (the “Western Reserve”), reveals uncomfortably for itself, the dishonesty in our society and its institutional and geographic arrangement. Liberty and justice are not for all.  You might think that there’s little to do that could do anything else than be this dishonesty, in some gradation of embarrassment, awareness and masochism. But there is another choice, head to the ground, working:  we can be purposeful, like a tributary leading to a river.

~

The thing lost in symbolic gesture, thereby absorbed in structural inequality, is purposeful organization toward the common good. That organization begins in a project by which a society internalizes its unintended and harmful effects on others while respecting and protecting everyone in it, their capabilities included. It persists in a project of moral restoration. On their best days, this is exactly the kind of organizing rationale by which art institutions arrange themselves.  It’s what you read in grant applications and what staff commonly believe about the course of their life and its purpose:  we work for the common good. We are restoring society against its history of violence. We own our shit. We are protecting the human and the more than human. We empower people. We respect everyone’s capacity for judgment.

But it is hard to be an artist or an educator in neoliberalism. Educators have it easier, since there are structures in place to remind us of our storied justifications: some public institutions such as schools and libraries, some salaried and collegiate practices that house memories of community and visions of other than profiteering purpose. Artists languish in their lone and unsupported state, cast to the world to hustle while suggesting they disclose an unseen brilliance in the grey day. Meanwhile, the new working class of adjunct and part-time teachers seek health insurance and a living wage, while artists spend the waking hours on Instagram, just as exposed and working odd jobs.

As Wendy Brown showed so well in Undoing the Demos, the first thing lost in neoliberalism is the mother of all purpose winding its way through life. As Aristotle first articulated theoretically at the dawn of action theory in the Greek philosophical tradition, purpose shapes our being. I do V in order to do W, and I support W in order to realize X; that X for the sake of Y; where the point of Y is Z.  Like this: Misty and I (S) meet every two weeks in order to (T) build a study space into our life together, and we do this so that we can begin  to (U) use our capacities and strengths, the point there being to (V) create text and image to (W ) share with our community as best we can; thereby, wanting to (X) take part in our community, thus to (Y) do some of our part, so as to (Z) respond to where we live and with whom we live from out of the core ways we each relate to life.

But in neoliberalism, where we must hustle toward the next month’s rent and think that we must be seen within the micro-niches of social media, thereby to create a buzz to help surround our island of work with the impression of value, the simple thing often lost is what the Greeks called the teleology -from telos, goal. Living along the Cuyahoga, I call it, as I said, “the river.” Against neoliberalism, we must keep the goal in view:  the common good.

~

Misty has been working on her next installation. It will be in Braddock, Pennsylvania, across from the U.S. Steel Plant in Unsmoke Systems, that heterodox community space Pittsburghers who relate to parts of life through contemporary art know. Like much plant life in her regional climate, what Misty makes will flourish in July, growing across a month.

At Unsmoke Systems, Misty will restore, partially, her grandma Em’s house. For Misty, Em was the matriarch and the root of home.

How do you restore a home that is lost, encountering and absorbing the loss?How can grieving be a form of giving? Misty will tape out the floorplan of the entire house in Unsmoke’s voluminous ground-floor space. Within Unsmoke’s high ceilings; dirty, enormous windows, and patchy walls, she’ll then frame several of the walls with 2x4s and two, even, with drywall. She will place the kitchen table and chairs her family inherited from the house in their would-be, former location, and she’ll line the drywall with two strata of informal photographs. The first stratum will show the emptying of Em’s home after her death some years ago. Then, the second stratum will show, from similar angles as shown in the first stratum, the reconstruction-for-new-occupants of the house. Seeing similar perspectives on its space, we’ll see the house emptying and then reforming. The photographs will be mounted along the  framing and drywalls so that they show the perspective you would actually see if you were in the house as you are on the floorplan. Finally, on the table will be a photo album:  reproduced photos from the ‘80s and 1990s when Misty’s family visited Em’s home for cook-outs, child-care, holidays, and gatherings. The original photos are held in Misty’s hand, then taken again, reproduced, thus being edged slightly by “now.” Misty learned this technique from Chloë Bass’s work at SPACES in 2015, one diptych of which hangs in our bedroom next to where we sleep and, often agitatedly, dream.

At the start of July, Misty will take off work for a week, leaving the accounting firm where she works to have a stable, living wage. After setting up the floorplan, the walls, the furniture, and the photos, she’ll hold the opening. Then, for the week, she will be in Unsmoke Systems for whomever from the surrounding communities wants to visit. She plans to let local schools and community organizations know. She’ll be asking people who want to come by to consider bringing a memory of home with them. If they want, she will take their photograph and then draw it over the remaining weeks. At the end of the month, she will hold a closing where, around the outer walls of Unsmoke Systems, the drawings next to the photos will present. Then, at closing, the people who chose to be photographed and drawn can take home the drawings of themselves if they want to do so. They will be theirs. Misty calls this July installation, “the family system.”

~

Last year, Misty gave me a portrait I love. It is called “Peonies.” The peonies shaping its background are the same that were in her grandmother’s yard – and which are now transplanted into our own out back by the summer porch where we have friends and family over in the cricket sound, windows all open to the night.

Peonies, Misty tells me, often live for hundreds of years. They are, bitterly, memories of the settlers who colonized this land. But they are also indigenous to the lands North and far West of here along the Pacific Ocean. 

All Images provided by the author(s).

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer runs the Beamer-Schneider Program in Ethics, Morals, and Civics at Case Western Reserve University. His recent books include Solar Calendar, and Other Ways of Marking Time (2017) and The Wind ~ An Unruly Living (2018).

Misty Morrison is a visual artist based in Cleveland, Ohio.  Her recent exhibitions include Oblivion (2017) and The Family System (forthcoming, 2018).