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Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia by Emily Hilliard (review)

2023; Southern Historical Association; Volume: 89; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/soh.2023.a909901

2325-6893

Mark A. Johnson,

Asian American and Pacific Histories

Reviewed by: Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia by Emily Hilliard Mark A. Johnson Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia. By Emily Hilliard. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2022. Pp. xviii, 277. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-7162-8; cloth, $99.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-7161-1.) In Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia, Emily Hilliard provides a more radical portrait of Appalachian West Virginia than it may appear to be at first glance. Through the words and expertise of West Virginians, this book tells the story of small-town museums, local festivals, songwriting, hot dogs, and independent professional wrestling with an eye toward how these traditions developed and what they mean for [End Page 789] people, their communities, and their state. For some readers, this book provides an entertaining tour of the amusing everyday culture of the state. While appealing to those interested in the history and quirkiness of West Virginia and Appalachia, the book also has a profound message about power and authority in a place typically defined by outsiders as a remnant of the past and devastated by extractive industry. Hilliard uses extraction, past, and future to set up the book’s central tension, in which the outcome determines who has power over the stories of these people and their place. Unlike others, Hilliard takes care not to extract (important word choice) the stories of West Virginia from the people and the place without their consent and ongoing contribution. Mining and other extractive industries have a stake in telling the story of West Virginia and Appalachia as a remnant of the past. Although such persistent romantic notions may seem harmless to most, especially to general readers, capitalism uses these stuck-in-time portrayals of West Virginia and its people to justify the destruction of the land, communities, and people under the guise of development and progress—or, in other words, the future. Of course, mountaintop removal mining and deforestation provide the most obvious examples of extraction, but she notes that the commodification of rural and small-town culture for consumption by the urban, likely liberal, East Coast bourgeois travelers works in a similar way. Appalachia has long been a place where people go to fetishize the poor, typically white, laborer. As Hilliard notes, Appalachian “people... effectively became national poster children for poverty spurred by the Great Depression,” but in a way that satisfied outsiders and politicians, like Franklin D. Roosevelt and Eleanor Roosevelt, who had their own paternalistic ideas about how to solve the region’s systemic problems (p. 32). Since about 2016, journalists have taken from the region stories for their newspaper features. Although it claims to portray the ideas and attitudes of so-called honest people, Hilliard believes that extractive journalism takes from the region by claiming to give people a voice, but it does so in a way that ultimately reinforces negative stereotypes even among those who claim to have sympathy for Appalachian people’s suffering from systemic issues. Hilliard provides a platform, instead of a voice, to these people. They have their own voice. She emphasizes that artists, songwriters, hot dog vendors, professional wrestlers, and others have expertise in their art and traditions and should control their own portrayals in the public imagination. They therefore control the narrative in her book. Hilliard safeguards their authority through the practice of a “collaborative ethnography” methodology, a vital approach in a place typically defined by extraction, not collaboration or empowerment (p. xiii). In addition to appealing to a general audience, this book has numerous classroom applications. While the book would be useful in its entirety, especially for classes on local history, public history, and Appalachian history, faculty will find pieces of it effective in undergraduate classrooms, too. Personally, I assigned the hot dog chapter in a class on foodways with particular attention to how traditions, which seem natural and timeless, emerge in particular times and places, and not without contestation. [End Page 790] Mark A. Johnson University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Copyright © 2023 The Southern Historical Association