To Repair a Broken World

Handspun and commercially spun yarns dyed by Dede Styles on display at the Southern Highland Craft Guild, Asheville, North Carolina, July 2008. Photograph from the Southern Highland Craft Guild.

in this ruptured time in our nation and around the world, as we witness the rapidly diminishing window of opportunity for climate-related action, the increasingly divisive and violent space of American politics, the movement for racial justice, shifting economies, and the tenacious hold of the pandemic and the warning of more to come, we have gathered voices here to offer perspectives on craft, creativity, reclamation, and repair. Katy Clune and Julia Gartrell share a series of poignant portraits and interviews with repair professionals across North Carolina in "Art & Alchemy," bringing focus to the gifted people we turn to for their expert abilities to restore everyday essential objects in our lives—from shoes to clocks, china, tires, cane seats, boats, and more. The authors note, "Among so many other things, the pandemic exposed our need to be more self-reliant and laid bare how much about our country needs fixing." As Clune points out, it's no coincidence that President Biden's major infrastructure program, the "Build Back Better" bill, addresses this "brokenness." She emphasizes, "This moment calls for repair."

Consider the home-bound sourdough breadmaking and baking revival, the online tutorials for hand-sewn face masks, the new knitters and quilters, the first-time vegetable gardeners and home food preservationists in the early months of the lockdown. This is certainly not the first moment in which Americans have sought comfort from craft—the handmade and homemade—as a material longing for simpler, "purer" times in the country's history. At the turn of the twentieth century, that longing was an expression of destabilized white Americans who feared losing power and place in a rapidly industrializing nation of new immigrants, a rising Black middle class, and socioeconomic change. (We witnessed the same grip of white supremacy in the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, and the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol in Washington, DC.) Despite romanticized depictions of its rural, agrarian character, the mountain South of the 1920s was a world of textile mills, timber, and coal production. Reformers, educators, and philanthropists turned to the region to revive "handicrafts" and folkways in a conflicting agenda of preservation and progress that literally sold the redemptive value of Anglo-Saxon heritage in a world threatened by but also embracing modernity. Advertisers and manufacturers marketed mountain culture, too, including its crafts and cuisine. New Deal projects of the 1930s and 1940s collected and celebrated southern craft heritage in wpa-sponsored murals, publications, media, exhibits, and oral history interviews. These ventures relied on the myth that Appalachian artists and crafts would disappear—as would their moralizing value and racial potency in society—if not for the intervention of dedicated outsiders.

In this special issue, our essayists counter this politicized narrative with stories and deep studies of southerners who are and were unexpected craftspeople and makers, whose work and workspaces have been marginalized and ignored in the past. These essays take us to home kitchens, barbecue joints, factories, small repair shops, forced labor camps of the enslaved South, historically Black communities and neighborhoods, the "weeds and 'mess'" of a mountain town, a tva electrification project and the segregated villages that housed Black workers and their families, the Bahamas, and a white Foxfire-reading family in the mountains of 1970s East Tennessee. In these places, we meet fully realized, complex individuals—not flattened stereotypes of craftsmen but craftspeople—and learn about issues that are central to craft, including racial empowerment, migration, spirituality, sustainability, environmental activism, interdependence, satisfaction, and joy.

The Crafted issue appropriately begins with "How the Sausage Is Made," Danille Elise Christensen's fascinating critique of patriarchal notions of craft, complicated and expanded through the hands and intellects of working people, especially women, who have long canned, bottled, and potted sausage at home and in factories across the region. The art of stretching seasonal food supplies through smoked...