Critical Regionalism

Connecting Politics and Culture in the American Landscape

Douglas Reichert Powell

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780807857946, 9780807830918
• eBook ISBN: 9781469606743
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The idea of “region” in America has often served to isolate places from each other, observes Douglas Reichert Powell. Whether in the nostalgic celebration of folk cultures or the urbane distaste for “hicks,” certain regions of the country are identified as static, insular, and culturally disconnected from everywhere else. In Critical Regionalism, Reichert Powell explores this trend and offers alternatives to it.

Reichert Powell proposes using more nuanced strategies that identify distinctive aspects of particular geographically marginal communities without turning them into peculiar “hick towns.” He enacts a new methodology of critical regionalism in order to link local concerns and debates to larger patterns of history, politics, and culture. To illustrate his method, in each chapter of the book Reichert Powell juxtaposes widely known texts from American literature and film with texts from and about his own Appalachian hometown of Johnson City, Tennessee. He carries the idea further in a call for a critical regionalist pedagogy that uses the classroom as a place for academic writers to build new connections with their surroundings, and to teach others to do so as well.

1 Rhetorics of Place and Region

An Appalachian Trail

In his meditation on the experience and meaning of place, Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino offers a brief parable describing life in the city of Leandra. Calvino explains the relationship of two types of household gods, Lares and Penates, who both lay claim to representing the “true essence of Leandra”: the Penates, who attach themselves to specific families, “believe they are the city’s soul, . . . and they believe they take Leandra with them when they emigrate.” The Lares, whose loyalties are instead to a particular house or lot, “consider the Penates temporary guests . . .; the real Leandra is theirs, which gives form to all it contains, the Leandra that was there before all these upstarts arrived and that will remain when all have gone away” (79). This chapter centers on a similar debate: does the “true essence” of a place derive from the people and the practices that “take place” in it, or does it come from some special quality about the place itself? Is there, indeed, something we might speak of as the “true essence” of a place?

I bring up these questions not to answer them, or even take sides on them, but to suggest that it is the very asking of questions like these that generates the complex and variable experience of place. Throughout this book I argue for a conflict-driven, evolving, generative, rhetorical model of region, and so this work begins with an inquiry into the concept of place more generally. Calvino’s fable is to the point in that it concludes not with the victory of Lares over Penates, or vice versa, but with the quarrel itself: “If you listen carefully, especially at night, you can hear them in the houses of Leandra, murmuring steadily, interrupting one another, huffing, bantering, amid ironic, stifled laughter.” It is the bustle of voices that distinguishes Leandra, voices that, importantly, are always critical of the current state of affairs: “The Penates bring out the old people, the great-grandparents, the great-aunts, the family of the past; the Lares talk about the environment before it was ruined.” These are also voices, however, that look to the future with both anticipation and concern: “[T]hey daydream of the careers the children will follow when they grow up (the Penates), or what this house in this neighborhood might become (the Lares) if it were in good hands” (79).

What neither party realizes is that it is not either definition, but the interaction of their definitions, that makes Leandra what it is. Calvino’s vision of place as a dense and layered network of worries and desires, debates, ambitions, and conflict, all framed by the land and the people who inhabit it, is a vision I wish to bring out of his fiction and insert into another set of debates, in order to suggest a complex, multivalent, generative model for thinking of place, and its articulations in other forms such as “region,” in terms which fully engage with its historical, geopolitical, and discursive character.

Region and Cultural Texts

By studying the idea of region, and in particular the ways southern Appalachia has been constructed, this chapter makes the argument that “place” is more complicated than anything about the physical nature of the place, the social practices of its inhabitants, or the qualities of the individual observer, taken singly, will account for. Rather, place is suspended somewhere between the absolutes of objectivity and subjectivity, of geography or sociality, a quality geographer Nicholas Entrikin terms the “betweenness of place.” “To understand place,” Entrikin asserts, “requires that we have access to both an objective and subjective reality.” Viewing place in purely social or purely empirical terms, as either location or social practices, is reductive; rather, “Place is best viewed from points in between” (Entrikin 5).

More important, this very suspension, a tense and dynamic state maintained by the exchange of opinions, ideas, and arguments about the nature of the place in question, gives that place its distinctive character. Place is thus a constantly generative construction in which the physical place, the practices of its inhabitants, and the intellectual observer are factors, but three among many factors. The experience of place is always mediated by preconceived notions, expectations, biases, and attitudes of the observer, and by these same considerations as they intersect from other sources. The idea of place, often described as a “sense” of place, is not so much sensory, as it is textual—taking text in the broad sense of its use in cultural critique, as any configuration of signs, any meaningful, communicative set of objects.

It would be a rash reduction, however, to say that places are “merely” textual creations. Writers are one of the many factors that create places, and they never act alone. At the very least, the physical space of the place the writer is helping to create must exist before that person, and in most instances a writer comes to write about a place because it is well-known in advance, whether popular, notorious, or sacred. Indeed, that renown is often the subject of and motivation for contemporary place writing, the vast majority of which consists of ephemera: guidebooks for travelers, regional interest pieces for tourists, pieces that are designed specifically to precondition the experience of a particular place by underscoring some aspects and omitting or deemphasizing others.

What I am describing here is a kind of layering—an appropriately geological metaphor, I think—of texts, experiences, and interpretations of specific locales that produces, in its ongoing processes, a place. In geological terms, though, the experience of place is more metamorphic than sedimentary: the layers have been bent, folded, broken, and melted into each other; they are transformed and transforming. To know a place, to acquire that “sense” of place, is not to consume an experience, or witness a spectacle, or appreciate a landscape, but to participate, through consumption, through witness, through appreciation, in the ongoing creation of that place, of its different interpretations and articulations, of its different “textual” expressions, as dense and political and historical as culture itself. In this sense, no place exists without its observers, or before it is observed—observation is in itself a creative act (though not a very durable one, until those observations are recorded and circulated in some form). The definition and etymology of “landscape” tells us that landscape without an observer is merely terrain and, indeed, that landscape is more about the representation of the land than the land itself (Jackson 3–8). Geographer Tim Cresswell acknowledges that, “Like a book, the landscape is created by authors, and the end product attempts to create certain meanings. But also, like a book, the people who ‘read’ the landscape and its places can never be forced to read it only one way” (13). This study proposes not only to read regional landscapes as textual forms, but to reverse the analogy and read texts as landscapes, asking how texts and their makers create versions of places that are more or less tendentious, influencing (intentionally or not) broader understandings of the places they depict.

Acknowledging that acts of writing affect the meanings of places means there is no privileged position for the writer from which to observe this process. All versions of a place and its culture are interested and partial, with political tendencies if not outright allegiances; this chapter discusses the politics of some more or less typical methods of depicting places. However, I claim no apolitical advantage for myself. In fact, one thing I would like for my reader to keep in mind is that this project is itself a deliberate part of the matrix of place. Especially since the place I am about to discuss is my home, east Tennessee, and the broader regional setting of the southern Appalachians of which it is a part, the comments I make here are self-conscious and reflexive, and unapologetically partisan. I want you to witness as you read a moment in the workings of place, not receive a coolly detached analysis of them. Indeed, I am alleging that such an analysis, regardless of its rhetorical invocation of objectivity, is necessarily implicated in the dynamics of place. Thus this study is not only about producing an analysis that can identify the cultural politics of place, but about developing a rhetoric that deliberately intervenes in these ongoing processes to create deliberate visions and versions of place—a project not only of cultural critique but of cultural production.

The Process in Motion: The Case of This Chapter

If the creation of place is like the writing of a text, then perhaps some reflection on the creation of the text before you is in order as well, in order to observe a segment of the larger processes of place formation. By considering how the text before you now has reached its present form, connecting along the way with a range of other visions and versions of place, I want to illustrate a set of related points central to my arguments throughout this book. First, a region is not a stable, finite thing, but a concept that emerges cumulatively from the circulation of texts about the region. Second, this rhetorical and representational character makes the concept of region particularly available for analysis by a transdisciplinary cultural criticism. Regardless of the field, the scholarly practice of regionalism generally takes the existence of the region as an a priori, more or less natural fact; by considering the example of my own work here, I want to suggest that even scholarly texts are partial, tendentious versions of region that circulate in broader discourses. Finally, this example illustrates how practitioners of critical regionalism could recognize and engage with the awareness of the partiality and the rhetorical character of their ideas of region, through a reflexive awareness of one’s own located-ness, a deliberate consciousness of where one is writing from and why.

No text leaps full-blown from the head of its author, and this text is no exception. The “boundaries” of this text and its history are just as contingent and unstable as the boundaries of the southern Appalachian region to which our attention will momentarily turn. This chapter has gone through a lengthy process of development, and appeared in various forms, before arriving before you now, and like other authors I hope it will continue to be re-presented, in discussion and debate, in the footnotes of other authors, perhaps in letters, in replies to letters, and so on. The text itself reminds you, through the occasional citation, of its own indebtedness to other texts, by other writers. This chapter alone uses a photograph, and maps, as well as some less traditionally scholarly texts: an imaginary picture (more about that shortly), excursions into the memories of the author, even a bit of a poem; beyond this chapter, the rest of the work invokes philosophy, history, film and popular culture, newspapers, magazines, novels—all manner of traditional texts, and textual readings of the built environment as well. Furthermore, that I have come to write this text at all represents a moment in my academic, intellectual training (which consists mostly of reading and writing texts), but also, more broadly, my biography (a term giving a textual coherence to the labyrinth of experience).

This text, then, has its own geology, strata that both represent its current form and encode the processes of its development. The current version of this chapter is a revision of an article that appeared in the academic journal Historical Geography, an article that was itself an expansion of an earlier one, which appeared in a magazine called Southern Exposure. This earliest published version was written very much in a different register; its language was designed for a nonacademic audience, and it was accompanied by a number of pictures and graphic enhancements intended to open access to a nonacademic readership. Furthermore, the magazine concerns itself with issues and events in the southern United States as a whole: perhaps its appearance in that venue encourages its readers to mentally annex Appalachia onto the image of the South as a kind of appendage, even though nothing in the article itself does so deliberately, and in fact a passage or two attempts to distinguish the Appalachians from the rest of “the South.” Meanwhile, the version that appeared in Historical Geography contextualized my discussion less in terms of the problems of a specific place but more as a reflection of a broader, abstract disciplinary problem, with the added complication that, as a humanities scholar publishing in a social science journal, it represented as well the translation between different disciplines, different sites on the intellectual landscape.

There are more layers, however, to be accounted for. That earlier Southern Exposure article was an expansion of a talk given at a gathering of people interested specifically in things Appalachian, the annual meeting of the Appalachian Studies Association (where the conflation of Appalachia with the South, or the decontextualization of place as an intellectual or disciplinary concern, is a potentially controversial maneuver). The session was well attended, and furthermore, I distributed some copies of the talk both before and after the session, so previous textual versions of the ideas here have been in circulation since then at least.

The conference presentation had a side effect that produced another line of texts, reproducing, complicating, and engaging with my texts. Douglas Imbrogno, a reporter, covered the meeting for the local newspaper (the Charlestown Gazette-Mail) and reproduced in that article some of my remarks. Here, however, they were reconfigured in several important ways. By way of introduction, for example, the article humorously contrasts the academic meeting with the “Eenie Weenie Bikini Contest” taking place that same weekend in a crosstown bar. The opposition of an uninhibited romp in a bar to a weekend of academic banter is frivolous (and telling) enough, but it also creates a context for a general readership in which to “place” academics and their work, a context that assigns academics a certain humorless niche in cultural life.

On the whole, though, the newspaper article does more than poke fun at the uptight reputation of scholars. In giving general coverage to a meeting of this kind, which involves not only a variety of people but also a wide range of forms of presentation—audio, video, and live performance—the article presents to the public readership of the newspaper the energy and range of interests that the meeting, and that the idea of Appalachia, encompasses. Perhaps most important, the article offers a perspective on the meeting that is not only focused on the panels themselves but also on “the discussions . . . the talk and music that often carries on toward dawn in bars and hotel rooms” (E1). In a phrase recalling Calvino’s talkative Lares and Penates, the article emphasizes a generative, social aspect to the meeting that a volume of proceedings might well fail to capture.

Most important, Imbrogno’s article carries the discussion of region to a broader range of the people of that region, in a forum to which they have at least limited access. One resident, the paper’s local history and local affairs columnist, Alice Faye Bragg, took up the issue in her column of 7 April 1995, in seeming response to a line from my talk, which served as a kind of epigraph to Imbrogno’s article: “What are we talking about when we talk Appalachia?” “I would never presume to align my simple mind with these intellectual thinkers and learned scholars,” she writes. But Bragg’s analysis is interesting in its own right, as it commences from a position of absolute certainty—“I know what Appalachia means to me”—through a dictionary definition relying wholly on geography (“‘parts of 11 states, with a population of 15 million’”) to a lengthy, nostalgic catalog of cultural practices, scenic tableaux, and metaphysical intuitions, culminating in the assertion that “Appalachia is that longing in the heart to come home again” (3D). This argument, in its total conviction (despite its internal contradictions), is part of the evolving, variable, larger debate over the region’s identity and, far from closing discussion, perpetuates it: indeed, it has just, in this paragraph, been reconfigured and responded to itself.

The process this text before you has undergone, because it is exactly the kind of circulation and modification that the broader cultural text of the idea of “Appalachia” undergoes, with no clear beginning or end point. By the same token, one could follow different moments in the development of this essay by linking events, activities, and works in my life and in others’ lives back to my birth, and in that spirit, continue on back through my own family tree. Shifting into a forward gear, we witness the manuscript of this chapter undergoing the debate, scrutiny, and revision of a dissertation defense; a publisher’s review process, including the careful critique of outside readers and my responses and reactions to those comments; and, I hope, reviews in scholarly journals, citation and critique in future academic works about place and region, and so forth. But even if nothing further happens to this project, it will have shaped some perceptions, perhaps changed or reinforced some opinions; even if you disagree with what I say here, the statement itself has helped provoke your disagreement, given you an interlocutor to argue against. Perhaps you will underline a phrase, make a remark in a margin. When you do, you inscribe your own text onto this one, altering its intellectual landscape, and the process continues.

The Process Arrested: An Imaginary Picture

Perhaps we can best understand the cultural and political issues at stake in the place-creation process in which the production and circulation of this manuscript are embroiled if we see how they are present at every moment. To do so requires taking one moment and (per the geological metaphor) breaking it to pieces, inspecting its layers, studying its composition—especially since we have just seen, in overview, the sedimentation that has produced it. Imagine a picture: a picture of me, composing the original conference-presentation version of this essay. I am sitting at a desk, wearing a flannel shirt, a baseball cap, facing a computer screen. Behind me is a window framing a view of the Boston skyline, the Prudential and John Hancock towers dominating the landscape. Above me on the wall is another vista, this one provided by a map, or rather a series of maps folded and thumbtacked and taped together to become one map, including the Johnson City, Jonesborough, Unicoi, Erwin, Elizabethton, and Iron Mountain Gap quadrangles of the United States Geographical Survey, U.S. Department of the Interior. I am looking at a black dot in the northeast corner of the Erwin quadrangle that indicates the farmhouse on forty acres where I used to live when I returned to Johnson City after college, in the early 1990s. Where is Appalachia in this picture? Indeed, what are we talking about when we talk about Appalachia? Is it on the map? Or is it in me?

For most of the people I knew around Boston, the latter would have to be the answer. Of course, for most of the people I knew around Boston, I am the only experience of Appalachia any of them had ever been aware of, so I bore the task of representing to them an entire region, people, practices, landscape and all. For these folks, I was a sort of traveling museum exhibit of Appalachia, a display of its traits and practices. Two years after the moment you are now picturing, in 1996, I will move to Ohio, and there I will find that in cities like Cincinnati and Dayton entire neighborhoods are labeled “Appalachian”—a practice that reinforces this model. Ohioans in general, I will discover, are very conscious of this point of geographical origin as lending one a crypto-ethnic identity. Ohioans hold festivals (like “Appalachian Days” at Cincinnati’s Coney Island park) that present a stable, autonomous image of Appalachian culture composed of a finite and fairly predictable set of cultural artifacts and practices—fiddles, whittling, quilts, folk dancing, and so forth—a version of my Boston friends’ interpretation of me, writ large. At a typical festival you will find little about the historical causes of the migration of populations mostly from the mountains of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia to these urban centers, an intricate pattern of economic, political, and social interconnections that have bound industrial cities to outlying regions.

As that historical aside implies, I am not willing to commit to this idea that Appalachia is somehow “inside” me anymore than I am to the ethereal, metaphysical idea of a “sense” of place. This group affiliation has more to do with a conscious, willful use of cultural commodities, an element of artifice, especially in settings where...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Critical Regionalism
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations and Maps
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: There’s Something about Mary
• 1 Rhetorics of Place and Region
• 2 From the Playground to the Dumping Ground
• 3 Panoramas of Gore and Other Social Inventions
• 4 We Have Only Words Against
• 5 Scholar Holler
• Epilogue: There’s Something about Mary (Reprise)
• Appendix: Durham Stories
• Works Cited
• Index