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Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia

2022; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/23288612.28.2.07

2328-8612

Carson E. Benn,

Archaeology and Natural History

Lost in Transition: Removing, Resettling, and Renewing Appalachia, edited by Aaron D. Purcell, speaks boldly on behalf of communities and individual landholders removed by federal and state authorities as part of titanic land-use experiments. The authors together provide an eminently valuable contrast to the triumphant, widely observed agency narratives about the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA); the Great Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah, and Mammoth Cave National Parks; and also the Manhattan Project. All of these ambitious and sweeping government initiatives have, in the public consciousness, saved parts of the mountain South from environmental devastation and economic doldrums. The authors here shift the focus to the people and the communities affected by those mass displacements—examining how they responded to or retaliated against the agencies’ incursions, the direct impacts of their removal, and how their memory of the removals has evolved through the present.The book's chapters excel, though it seems that Purcell could have offered a more ambitious introduction. On one hand, the reasons for not pursuing any contributions on the theft of Indigenous land and Native American displacement—mainly that these were a more publicly controversial and constitutionally dubious process than the relatively mundane eminent domain proceedings that created the TVA, and so on—are convincing. Less compelling is Purcell's “concept” of loss, which he invokes interchangeably with the “theme” of loss that ties the chapters together. The components of the analytical framework for such a welcome concept appear to be present in his contributors’ work, but there is no attempt here by Purcell to assemble them. Some of the swipes at his peers’ publications appear clumsy. Can he seriously say that Kathryn Newfont's Blue Ridge Commons (2012) and Sara M. Gregg's Managing the Mountains (2010) merely “mentioned the significance of removals from an environmental and conservation-history perspective” (6), and that “a deep discussion of the loss associated with regional removal initiatives” was “absent from these studies” (7)? Both have page after page on the cultural and personal effects of enclosure and resettlement as evidence to the contrary.However, Purcell lands a much more effective blow at Michael J. McDonald and John Muldowny's TVA and the Dispossessed (1982) in his introduction and chapter, and he is joined in turn by the other contributors to Lost in Transition. McDonald and Muldowny (1982) certainly offer up a classic study of the TVA and the massive scale of its displacement program, but their impressive range of quantitative data analysis somewhat defeats their ability to portray the felt human costs of being removed and resettled and the sense of place that was violated by an unfeeling federal bureaucracy. McDonald and Muldowny, cognizant of this pitfall as they researched, still inadvertently helped to claim scholarship on the TVA and its contemporary resettlement projects as the province of neoclassical economists and agricultural policy experts. Scholars of place have been reluctant to challenge this claim—an abdication that reaffirms the federal agencies’ logic that people can be relocated en masse with little regard for the larger emotional and cultural damages inflicted, so long as the affected individual parties are adequately compensated and sent on their way.The chapters in Lost in Transition work against this trend in a number of ways. The focus is, of course, kept on the people affected by displacement projects: their contact with various agencies, their resistance to the visions of “progress” proffered by the encroaching bureaucracies, and the landscapes of memory and planned environment that people have inhabited since the removal. The TVA and the National Park Service (NPS) figure prominently, as one would expect, but they are complemented by sections on the Manhattan Project and the private-public partnership that resulted in the Keowee-Toxaway Project in South Carolina's portion of Appalachia. Purcell's categorization of the chapters holds that removal projects were initiated either for the purpose of “preserving existing natural spaces” (15) or to “creat[e] intentional natural spaces with obscured industrial purposes” (16). Multiple authors show that the promotion and creation of distinct, naturally scenic spaces could just as easily be considered an “obscured industrial purpose,” albeit on a different scale than regional electric power production. Still, though, the research Purcell has gathered is no less valuable to Appalachian studies scholarship.The displaced in these chapters cannot be mistaken for merely passive victims. Alyssa Warrick's section on Mammoth Cave, Katrina M. Powell and Savannah Paige Murray's section on Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge Power Project, and Matthew Chisholm's study of the Swain County (North Carolina) “Road to Nowhere” offer a varied look at how mountain residents reacted to impending or enforced removal, ranging from bitter resentment to protracted legal and political challenges. Most of the chapters dedicate strong portions to the construction of displacement memory that surrounds displaced communities and the areas they vacated. The celebration of Decoration Day figures prominently, with authors drawing attention to how displaced families commemorate not only their lost loved ones, but also the spaces and homes from which their families have been removed. Contested sites of memory are most effectively detailed in Russell Olwell's study of Oak Ridge, as he traces how displacement, Cold War, and atomic science history, and Jim Crow segregation are all layered onto the land's history. No easy summary or singular narrative can be brokered within these narratives, and the same applies for many other histories of displacement.Herculean government planning on the order and scale of the TVA, NPS, and so on, may be altogether behind us in the present day (though many would hope that some similarly ambitious effort could be aimed at the effects of climate change). By contrast, Austin Gregory's chapter on the Keowee-Toxaway Project, a private-public compact that was executed with far less national attention, carries much more resonance with the more common forms of land taking and displacement of recent decades. The heft of Duke Power's influence into local and state politics, mobilized to create a massive lake and hydroelectric facility, operated in such a way as to cast opponents of the project as enemies of progress and economic development who had, as one op-ed from the era described, a “psychopathic fear of all private utilities” (198). Land activists face these same dynamics through the present day, and they would not want readers to think of displacement in Appalachia as solely a matter of high-profile eminent domain decisions handed down from the federal government.All told, Lost in Transition is an outstanding collection for students of environment, policy, and place in Appalachia. No doubt, there are many other histories of displacement and challenges to displacement policy throughout the region, and the book should shed some new light on them for interested scholars.