Hey qould you mind explaining your beef with hillbilly elegy? It comes up on a lot of my book recs and I keep conaidering reading it but I dont want to commit the time if its garbage. Are there other books you would recommend about the region or rural life generally. Thanks!
No one has dissected this better than Elizabeth Catte. These are some good excerpts from the introduction and first chapter of her new book, which is a response to Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy.”
Elizabeth Catte, “What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia,” 2018, pgs. 7-9, 14, 21-23, 25, 35-36:
[Hillbilly Elegy,] [t]he best-selling “memoir of a family and of a culture in crisis,” now set to be turned into a film by Ron Howard, had become our political moment’s favorite text for understanding the lives of disaffected Trump voters and had set “hillbillies” apart as a unique specimen of white woe. Using the template of his harrowing childhood, Vance remakes Appalachia in his own image as a place of alarming social decline, smoldering and misplaced resentment, and poor life choices. For Vance, Appalachia’s only salvation is that complete moral re-alignment coupled with the recognition that we should prioritize the economic investments of our social betters once more within the region…
Election season cast Appalachia as a uniquely tragic and toxic region. The press attempted 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, when it became too late, the pendulum swung in the opposite direction and empathy became heretical. Appalachia, political commenters proclaimed, could reap what it had sown.
There’s not a single social problem in Appalachia, however, that can’t be found elsewhere in our country. If you’re looking for racism, religious fundamentalism, homophobia, addiction, unchecked capitalism, poverty, misogyny, and environmental destruction, we can deliver in spades. What a world it would be if Appalachians could contain that hate and ruin for the rest of the nation. But we can’t…
According to the bulk of coverage about the region in the wake of Trump’s election and the success of Hillbilly Elegy, currently at fifty weeks on the New York Times list, I do not exist. My partner does not exist. Our families do not exist. Other individuals who not exist include all nonwhite people, anyone with progressive politics, those who care about the environment, LGBTQ individuals, young folks, and host of others who resemble the type of people you’ll meet in this volume. The intentional omission of these voices fits a long tradition of casting Appalachia as a monolithic “other America.”
While many regional groups experience this treatment, as scholar Elizabeth Engelhardt recently wrote in the journal Southern Cultures, “Appalachia stands out, however, in the sheer length of time that people have believed it could be explained simply, pithily, and concisely… again and again Appalachia is relegated to the past tense: ‘out of time’ and out of step with any contemporary present, much less a progressive future.”…
Many Appalachians are poor, but their poverty has a deep and coherent history rooted in economic exploitation. The coal industry is no longer a significant employment sector in Appalachia, but the dominance of coal’s extractive logic has permanently ruined people and land in ways with which we must still contend. The people of Appalachia are predominantly white, but the region is adding African American and Hispanic individuals at a rate faster than most of the nation. The average Appalachian is not, then, a white, hyper masculine coal miner facing the inevitable loss of economic strength and social status, but the average Appalachian’s individual worldview may be impacted by individuals with cultural capital who are constantly assuming we are all made in that image…
Following Trump’s victory, pundits often engaged in a project of a different fantasy, one where Appalachia might be isolated and left to reap what it had sown. For liberal political commentators there were no wealthy donors, white suburban evangelicals, or insular Floridian retirees responsible for Trump’s victory, only hillbillies…
For many Americans, the election simply cast “the Appalachian” in a role he appeared born to play: the harried and forgotten white everyman, using the only agency left in his bones to bring ruin on his countrymen and selfishly move our nation backward, not forward. Instead of serving as the instrument of his own torture, his false hope was now weaponized and aimed at the nation.
This projection of Appalachia is melodramatic and strategic in equal measure. It reflects a longstanding pattern of presenting Appalachia as a monolithic “other America” that defies narratives of progress. These narratives, however, are designed to allow you to applaud the casting choice without wondering who wrote the script.
Sandwiched between email servers and Access Hollywood outtakes, Appalachians stood ready to offer human interest stories that demystified, or so the press assumed, the appeal of a distinct type of political annihilation. pundits explained our socio-economic realities to one another under the guise of educating a presumed audience of coastal elites whom, they argued, had become hardened to the plight of the forgotten America…
What we now know, of course, is that these narratives employed a slight of hand that used working-class people to illustrate the priorities and voting preferences of white middle-class and affluent individuals. The Washington Post and other outlets issued correctives, reporting that “the narrative that attributes Trump’s victory to a ‘coalition of most blue-collar and white working-class voters’ just doesn’t square with the election data.”
People in power use and recycle these strategies not because it’s enjoyable to read lurid tales of a pathological “other”-although that certainly informs part of the allure-but because they are profitable. And if you trace a flawed narrative about Appalachia back far enough, you’ll often find someone making a profit…
…the invention of the “other” went hand in hand with the desire to broker a rich land from poor people. This process unfolded with intent and malice, often to justify the most exploitative manifestations of capitalism in order to make them appear natural or necessary.
“Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy” is also a recent response to the book I’ve heard good things about, but I haven’t read it yet.
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