Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film by Meredith McCarroll (review)

In her film studies monograph Unwhite: Appalachia, Race, and Film, Meredith McCarroll uses critical race theory to reexamine Appalachian stereotypes in cinema. She compares stock Appalachian types with cinematic stereotypes of African Americans, Native Americans, and Mexican Americans in films ranging from Deliverance (1972) to The Dollmaker (1984). Appalachian characters, she argues, occupy a category she calls “unwhite,” or images that are “phenotypically white . . . . that align closely with the representations of nonwhites, which have, for a century, been used to demean, alienate, make comic, demonize, and otherwise place the nonwhite subject in an alterior position” (p. 13). She posits that “narrow and derogatory stereotypes” of Appalachians place them in a liminal space, “outside of white normative culture” (p. 13).

The first three chapters seek points of comparison between Appalachian and racialized cinematic stereotypes. Chapter 1, “Hillbilly as American Indian,” recasts the character of the “monstrous mountaineer” in John Boorman’s film Deliverance as a “civil savage,” comparable to the “vanishing Indian” in Michael Mann’s movie The Last of the Mohicans (1992) (p. 22). Doomed to extinction, both types exhibit a “violent brutality that emerges outside civilized reaches” (p. 22). Both serve as foils to white male protagonists—Jon Voight as Ed Gentry and Daniel Day-Lewis as Hawkeye—who combine “civilized and animalistic” traits that simultaneously challenge and reify so-called white civilization (p. 36). In chapter 2, “Appalachian Woman as Mammy,” McCarroll likens Renée Zellweger’s portrayal of Ruby Thewes in Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain (2003) to Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy in Gone with the Wind (1939). Like McDaniel’s Mammy figure, Ruby is a font of practical wisdom, provides a source of comic relief, and satisfies what David Pilgrim calls a “‘nostalgic yearning’” for the plantation South, having as her primary object “the survival of the southern belle” (pp. 41, 52). McCarroll says little, however, about Ruby’s subject position as a free (though poor) mountain woman and its differences from Mammy’s status as a hereditary slave. Chapter 3, “Mountain Migrant as Mexican Migrant,” similarly juxtaposes cinematic portrayals of Appalachian migrants in cities with cultural tropes of Latinx immigrants. McCarroll views the character of Gertie Nevels (played by Jane Fonda) in Daniel Petrie’s 1984 television film The Dollmaker as analogous to today’s Mexican and Central American migrants, who are shown “as best back where they came from” (p. 66). McCarroll likewise draws parallels between depictions of Mexican American miners, in Herbert J. Biberman’s 1954 classic Salt of the Earth, and Appalachian migrants in Chicago, in Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969), as cultural outsiders who yearn for a lost homeland. These comparisons yield insights, situating stereotypes of Appalachian figures in larger patterns of stereotypes in film, but greater engagement with material differences in power, citizenship, and racialization would add depth and complexity to all three chapters.

The book’s most effective section comes last, in chapter 4, “Appalachia and Documentary.” While early documentarians depicted a poor backward region, attempts to challenge the stereotypes, in response to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty, evoked Appalachia “in undeniably beautiful, haunting, and poignant images” (p. 84). McCarroll highlights recent community-based models of documentary practice emerging from Kentucky’s Community Film Workshop of Appalachia (now Appalshop, but founded via National Endowment for the Humanities funding in 1969) and Georgia’s Foxfire Fund (founded in 1966). For example, Elizabeth Barret’s documentary Stranger with a Camera (2000), produced by Appalshop, broke new ground by questioning the authority of the documentary filmmaker through inclusive production methods. Similarly, Hollow (2013), Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s collaborative experimental documentary, features an interactive storytelling model based on community participation. McCarroll’s concluding focus on nonfiction documentary offers a creative path to dislodging troubling stereotypes and suggests that collaborative and inclusive projects are most likely to yield positive and realistic portrayals of Appalachia.