Re -writing region, re -constructing whiteness: Appalachia and the 'place' of whiteness in American culture, 1930--2003

In this dissertation, I argue that the Appalachian region is symptomatic of the ways that fantasies and anxieties about white racial identity, particularly white working-class identity, circulate in American culture. In this project, I seek to extend the scope of critical studies of whiteness and American studies by de-familiarizing conceptions of the region as provincial and isolated and contending that Appalachia is a focal point for displacing and confronting national anxieties about racial and cultural purity. The racial and class significance of Appalachia is registered through a central paradox: as a cultural signifier, the racial visibility of Appalachian whites is alternately implemented in the commodification of a racially "pure" national heritage, and invoked as an image of abject, abeyant whiteness against which normative, middle-class whiteness imagines its claims to privilege. The texts I examine, both literary and cultural, index the ambivalent symbolic status of Appalachia, fluctuating between that which epitomizes American culture---particularly constructions of an American Anglo-Celtic "folk" culture---and that which threatens to disrupt or pollute it. Thus, Appalachia emerges as a site through which normative whiteness is negotiated.;Examining literary works alongside cultural texts like music, photography, and eugenics, I demonstrate that, because Appalachia has been perceived and at times marketed as predominantly "white," its ambivalent status in the American imagination at once embodies and complicates the relationship between national identity and constructions of whiteness. Through the paradox of racial purity and "white trash," or socially abjected white poverty, Appalachia becomes a contested site through which the boundaries of the normative white body and the normative white nation are reproduced and renegotiated. I explore these issues as they circulate through historical moments like the Depression-era 1930s, the mass-migratory population shifts during World War II, the post-1960s poverty wars, and the early twenty-first century revivification of discourses of cultural "authenticity." In my study, I draw on writers often identified, to varying degrees, as Appalachian, such as James Still, Harriette Arnow, Dorothy Allison, Cormac McCarthy, and Lee Smith, as well as Affrilachian author Frank X. Walker and public personae like Dolly Parton.