After some research, page 10 of Google, to be exact, I found this review of Deliverance written in the Nashville Scene.

http://www.nashvillescene.com/arts-culture/film/article/13037765/deliverance-remains-the-movies-most-chilling-portrayal-of-nature-making-man-its-bitch

The author, Craig Lindsey, claims to be from Texas (which obviously is not even part of Appalachia), and agrees with the fact that there are redneck rapists out there in the woods waiting for victims. This opinion struck me as odd considering his roots, but then once you take into consideration the fact that he first watched this as a 12 year old it offers some form of excuse for his argument that the toothless yokels actually exist somewhere (probably right over that hill next to the Shakespearean village). His misunderstanding of what Appalachia is shows a lack of research into the region prior to publishing this article. That also means that there was no Appalachian voice in this article. However, near the end of the article he did argue that the movie did nothing to change the negative stereotype of the backwoods South, describing a transition to the “ignorant, racist, redneck rapists.” He chooses to focus on the subtext to the negative stereotypes. He takes the rape of Bobby as a metaphor for the nature of man to try to control nature. In a way, this author believes, the damming of the river (and likely the cemetery relocation) was the deeper meaning to the initially traumatizing.

“The Unquiet Earth” by Denise Giardina is a novel filled with stereotypes and defining cultural features. Of the many passages that speak to the themes discussed in class two specifically stick out to me as defining sections. The first one is the section titled “Till Human Voices Wake Us” on page 351 and describes the moment the dam finally breaks. This passage is crucial because it is the culmination of all the efforts of the residents of Number Thirteen to Make their voices heard. The townspeople had been complaining and warning about the potential dam collapse for months, but the big coal people and their local lackeys *cough Arthur Lee Sizemore cough* refuse to listen. Arthur Lee himself knew that the dam would break but was more concerned about his financial stance and power station to make any real change. Their inability to see past their wallets led to the flooding of the entire region and the loss of over 100 lives. This also represents how the culture and land of Appalachia was swept away by the flood of mechanized greed released by the powerful coal companies.
The second defining passage is on page 235. This is the scene where Dillon takes Tom, aka VISTA, and Jackie to visit his uncle’s hermit cabin in order to show them what strip mining has done to their family land. I consider this passage defining because it encompasses many of the attitudes/perceptions towards Appalachia. In Dillon And Tom you find the desire to make lasting changes for the better, albeit through very different avenues: Tom takes the government support route and disproves of Dillon’s guerilla tactics (“People here talk about you like they admire you, but I don’t see why. You just hide in that trailer all the time. It’s a fucking waste, man.”) while Dillon takes pride in his “grassroots” political participation as the only effective means to an end, disproving of Tom’s avenue (“You work for the government, and the government and the company, they’re the same. They didn’t send you in here to get anything done. They sent you in here to make folks think they care.”). Then of course there’s Jackie, who is letting all this happen around her while she worries about trivial matters like her shoes and her crush. She is not by any means representing the general female gender role of the time, but rather the self-involved attitude that allows such bad things to happen by their refusal to pay attention to the world around them.

Alan Banks and Sally Maggard discuss connected topics in their works, “Miners Talk Back: Labor Activism in Southeastern Kentucky in 1922” and “Coalfield Women making History,” respectively. Banks discusses in great detail the birth of a stereotype regarding east Kentucky coal miners during the great strike of 1922. According to him, “the assumption in 1922 was that southeastern Kentucky miners were not part of the national strike. In  the writings of government officials…Kentucky miners emerge as fiercely independent mountaineers uninterested in the own collective self-improvement (216),” a perception that is only true if one takes a quick glimpse at some broadly interpreted statistics. However, as Banks later goes into detail on, a closer look at the actual events in Kentucky in 1922 will tell a very different story. It is here that Sally Maggard ties in with Banks. Maggard uses her text to describe a specific side of the story that is not normally told to the public: the role of women in the Kentucky coal strikes (and beyond, of course). With an in-depth view of how women won the coal strike when the men were continuously failing, provided by Maggard, and the play-by-play of the construction of the apathetically independent coal miner stereotype from Banks, the reader of these works can then dissect and reconstruct the actual Appalachian coal-culture hidden behind the veil of mainstream entertainment.

1. “Among the most significant changes that migration brought about in the second half of the twentieth century, the outflow of black residents made the Appalachian region decidedly whiter” (313). Beyond simply making the Appalachian region homogeous, what other cultural  shifts happened as a result of the vast African American diaspora?
2. What was the underlying motivation in the “rehabilitation” and “resettlement” programs in Appalachia (313)?
3. What are some specific ways in which the programs of “poverty warriors, AV and VISTA volunteers, civil rights and labor militants, environmentalists, and settlers” (349) may overlap both then and now?