Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy ed. by Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll (review)

In the wake of what many from the region regard as the unfortunate and even infuriating popularity of J. D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy, the editors of the collection Appalachian Reckoning offer a chance to "reclaim Appalachia" as it exists for the enormously diverse communities, experiences, and perspectives that make up the region. Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll have provided an opportunity for other voices to speak out, as they put it, to "pass the microphone" to those who have felt silenced and those who would largely counter Vance's reductive "culture in crisis" conceptualization of their communities, families, and memories. While not all of the diverse pieces in the collection are critical of Vance, most are, and they leave an overall impression of conceptual, if not structural, accord.

Divided into two parts, one containing more analytical and the other more creative pieces, the collection's greatest weakness may be its somewhat splintered, multi-generic structure. There are dozens of pieces of prose, poetry, and photography in the collection. While one of the advantages of Vance's memoir is its simple, coherent bootstrap narrative and reliance on familiar tropes about the "culture of poverty," Appalachian Reckoning provides a more fraught and partitioned space for critical perspectives, diverse voices, and nuanced analyses. This may reduce the readership of the collection, but if the goal is both to respond to Elegy's errors and to capture the many unheard views and multiplicity of experience that Elegy seems to overshadow, there's really no other way to go about it in a single volume. On the whole, the collection is successful at providing a much-needed corrective to, and a broadening of, the discussion about Appalachia in the twenty-first century.

A central strength of Appalachian Reckoning is its selection of photographs "that reveal other ways of envisioning what Vance gets right and wrong about the region" (9). The pioneering crowd-sourced photo project Looking at Appalachia provides both a model for the anthology (empowering Appalachians to "tell their own stories"), as well as a source of illustrations that encourage the volume's readers "to consider a region shaped by the dignity of hard work and devastating environmental degradation, diversity and activism, and countless stories of the joys and sorrows of everyday people" (9). Of particular note, Rebecca Kiger's "Olivia's Ninth Birthday Party" and Roger May's "Aunt Rita along the King Coal Highway, Mingo County, West Virginia" are well on their way to becoming iconic visualizations of the region, having also appeared in various media outlets across the nation. In one way or another, these images are meditations, upon "how person and place can become intimately entangled," in the words of contributor Danielle Dulken (226). They are meditations upon a diverse and complex region, where we find, as Roger May notes, "no elegy there, only an inscription of love and home" (320).

Dwight Billings's contribution addresses the contemporary political climate, coining the term "Trumpalachia" to describe the "mythical place" that Vance and fellow conservative luminaries imagine when writing about the region. Noting that there "is nothing new here in Vance's recycling of worn-out culture of poverty theory," Billings reminds us that the "real focus" of Hillbilly Elegy is "not Appalachia but the experience of Appalachian out-migration"—a topic that "has been expertly documented by Appalachian scholars, but their research does not inform" Vance's analysis (39–41). Billings concludes that Hillbilly Elegy is "at once an advertisement for the neoliberal promised land of zombie-like entrepreneurial souls and an elegy for a dying but not dead enough Scots-Irish regional culture that doesn't really exist" (46).

William Turner's much-needed essay, "Black Hillbillies Have No Time for Elegies," explores the outmigration of Appalachians since the 1950s and reflects upon the challenges and successes that black Appalachians have experienced in the same diaspora...