Chapter 40 Further Reading: Whose Appalachia? Race, Class, Gender, and the Fight Over a Region's Story

Turner, William H., and Edward J. Cabbell, eds. Blacks in Appalachia. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1985. One of the first major scholarly collections focused on Black Appalachian experience, this anthology brought together historians, sociologists, and community voices to document a presence that the dominant narrative had erased. Turner and Cabbell's collection remains foundational — both for its content and for its argument that Black Appalachian history is not a subset of either African American history or Appalachian history but a distinct field demanding its own attention.

Walker, Frank X. Affrilachia. Lexington: Old Cove Press, 2000. The poetry collection that gave institutional form to the word Walker had coined a decade earlier. The poems in Affrilachia range across Black Appalachian experience — from the deeply personal to the politically charged — and the title poem has become a foundational text of the movement. Essential reading for anyone seeking to understand how naming creates visibility and how visibility creates power.

Wilkinson, Crystal. The Birds of Opulence. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016. Wilkinson's novel — set in a small Black community in the hills of Kentucky — maps the interior lives of Black mountain women with intimacy and power that the Appalachian literary tradition had never achieved. The novel insists on the existence and complexity of Black Appalachian life without explaining it to outsiders, demanding that the reader meet the community on its own terms.

Smith, Barbara Ellen. "De-gradations of Whiteness: Appalachia and the Complexities of Race." Journal of Appalachian Studies 10, no. 1/2 (2004): 38-57. A foundational essay that analyzes how whiteness functions in Appalachian identity — not as a neutral descriptor but as a constructed category that includes some people and excludes others. Smith's analysis of the racialization of Appalachian identity provides the theoretical framework for understanding why the Affrilachian movement was necessary and what it challenges.

Mann, Jeff. Loving Mountains, Loving Men. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. Mann's memoir of growing up gay in Hinton, West Virginia, is the most sustained and honest literary account of queer life in rural Appalachia. Mann writes about desire, shame, landscape, family, and the ache of belonging to a place that does not fully acknowledge who you are. His work refuses the narrative of escape — insisting on the possibility of being fully oneself in the mountains — and provides essential context for understanding LGBTQ+ Appalachian experience.

Garringer, Rae. Country Queers: A Love Letter. New York: Tin House Books, 2024. Based on the oral history project Garringer launched in 2013, this book documents the experiences of LGBTQ+ people in rural America with nuance and care. The interviews reveal a landscape of experience far more complex than stereotypes suggest — stories of rejection alongside stories of acceptance, stories of departure alongside stories of staying. Essential for understanding queer rural life beyond the assumptions of urban-centered LGBTQ+ movements.

House, Silas. Southernmost. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2018. House's novel — about a pastor in a small Tennessee town who is expelled from his church after sheltering a gay couple — explores the conflict between religious community and queer acceptance in rural America. The novel is significant both as literature and as activism: written by one of Appalachia's most beloved writers, it insists that the values of mountain communities can and should expand to include LGBTQ+ people.

Inscoe, John C., ed. Appalachians and Race: The Mountain South from Slavery to Segregation. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. A scholarly collection that traces the racial history of Appalachia from slavery through the Jim Crow era, documenting the presence and experience of Black Appalachians in a region whose dominant narrative has denied their existence. The essays in this collection provide essential historical context for the arguments made in this chapter.

Lewis, Helen, and Marat Moore, eds. Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case. Boone, NC: Appalachian Consortium Press, 1978. One of the foundational texts of Appalachian Studies, this collection argued that Appalachia's economic condition was best understood through the lens of internal colonialism — a framework that connected the region's exploitation to patterns of colonial extraction worldwide. Lewis's introduction remains one of the most influential statements of the field's founding principles.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. "Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics." University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 139-67. The foundational article in which Crenshaw coined the term "intersectionality." While not Appalachian-specific, Crenshaw's framework — which analyzes how multiple forms of oppression combine and interact — is essential to the analytical approach this chapter applies to Appalachian identity. Demanding reading but indispensable for anyone seeking to understand why single-axis categories (race alone, class alone, gender alone) fail to capture the experience of people at the intersections.

Anglin, Mary K. "Feminist Perspectives on Appalachia: Rewriting the History of Our Mothers." Journal of Appalachian Studies 3, no. 1 (1997): 15-28. Anglin's essay on feminist approaches to Appalachian history argues for centering women's experience not as a supplement to the dominant narrative but as a correction of it. Her analysis of women's labor, community building, and political activism provides theoretical grounding for the argument this chapter makes about women's centrality to Appalachian history.

Eller, Ronald D. Uneven Ground: Appalachia Since 1945. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008. Eller's comprehensive post-World War II history provides essential context for understanding how the modern Appalachian narrative was constructed — through the War on Poverty, the Appalachian Regional Commission, media coverage, and political rhetoric. His analysis of whose interests the dominant narrative serves connects directly to this chapter's argument about the politics of storytelling.

Satterwhite, Emily. Dear Appalachia: Readers, Identity, and Popular Fiction Since 1878. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2011. Satterwhite analyzes how popular fiction has shaped the American understanding of Appalachian identity — reinforcing stereotypes, constructing whiteness, and establishing the narrative conventions that this chapter challenges. Her work provides essential context for understanding how stories about Appalachia have functioned as political tools.

Dunaway, Wilma A. The African-American Family in Slavery and Emancipation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dunaway's study of African American family life in the mountain South challenges the assumption that slavery in Appalachia was fundamentally different from slavery elsewhere. Her research, which includes detailed analysis of slaveholding patterns in mountain counties, provides essential data for understanding the depth and significance of Black presence in the region.

Fisher, Steve, and Barbara Ellen Smith, eds. Transforming Places: Lessons from Appalachia. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. A collection that examines how Appalachian communities are navigating contemporary challenges — economic transformation, environmental degradation, cultural change — with attention to the diversity of the region's populations. The essays in this collection take seriously the intersectional complexity that this chapter demands, examining how race, class, gender, and place interact in specific communities.