Comparative Literature: The View from Appalachia

Upper level undergraduate classes as well as graduate seminars often provide the opportunity for some teaching faculty to not only incorporate their current research into their teaching but also develop and experiment with different concepts, which later find their way in published articles or books. However, for others, the classroom is not just a space that enables one to brainstorm ideas for future publication on a given subject; instead, the process of designing a syllabus, the selection of a theme, the decision to highlight or mitigate specific voices, experiences, and representations in order to achieve specific learning outcomes constitute, in and of themselves, the focal subject of analysis. It is by examining the ongoing construction and reconstruction of a syllabus from a Comparative Queer Theory and Literature course that this article examines the invisibility of Appalachian and Kenyan queer identities in prevailing theoretical visualizations of queer spaces across cultural contexts. In particular, the article analyzes how specific Kenyan and Appalachian texts employ similar rhetorical strategies to contest heteronationalist and metronormative narratives that have been used to efface the visibility of queer subjectivities and practices within the local cultural milieus from which they stem.