The Myth of Obsolescence: Writing Appalachia as Relic Culture

Appalachia is often envisioned as what cultural theorist Evan Watkins calls a “throwaway” or “relic culture,” a space left behind, and never quite culturally contemporary, never “new.” This presentation will attempt to account for some of the early twentieth-century cultural discourses that allowed for the emergence, and continuation, of this temporal construct, providing a brief overview of the influence of eugenic social science and related social history and literature. It will then move forward in time to the contemporary period, to engage with current thinking about the region, keeping in mind the ways in which the very concept in the national cultural imagination has always been about the past. As Kathleen Stewart points out in her landmark text on Appalachian alterity, A Space on the Side of the Road, Appalachia in contemporary social discourse has become a cultural zone, perhaps the cultural zone, of American archaism and “decay.” This characterization may seem familiar to a contemporary reader who, having a general knowledge of the stereotyped vision of Appalachia as an anachronistic geographical and cultural area, might be surprised to learn that such a characterization did not become fully articulated in social and literary discourses until the twentieth century. In other words, the “new” way of thinking about Appalachia, one that served certain economic and cultural agendas, was to think of it as intensely “old.” This presentation will finally ask why it is so difficult for mainstream thinkers to envision Appalachia as part of our contemporary material and cultural economy