Category: Appalachian Storytelling
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Category Description: This category includes texts interested and invested in rhetorical and narrative practices, methodologies, and theories that live in relation to cultures, communities, and spaces constructed as and/or identified with Appalachia.
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Sources
Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women’s Literacies. Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment: Appalachian Women’s Literacies.. Ohio University Press, 2011. https://muse-jhu-edu.libezproxy2.syr.edu/book/2347/
Annotation: Bringing together literary, narrative, and literacy studies, Locklear’s Negotiating a Perilous Empowerment analyzes the novels and memoirs of four Appalachian women authors to examine the (conflicted) relationship between Appalachian women and literacy acquisition. As Locklear’s title suggests, she is particularly interested in how the authors she studies (Harriette Simpson Arnow, Linda Scott DeRosier, Denise Giardina, and Lee Smith) represent the tensions between literacy as empowerment and literacy as a (self, family, and community) conflict in the lives of Appalachian girls and women. As Locklear writes that studying the “identity-related dilemmas” of literacy acquisition can allow us to “better understand the saturation of illiteracy stereotypes, the effects of those misconceptions on Appalachian people, and the subsequent empowerments and perils mountain women encounter when gaining new literacies” (53). Importantly, in her examination of Lee Smith’s work, Locklear (and Smith) examine the ways that many of women’s literacy activities in Appalachia are more private or communal than public-facing, and how women writers in rural Appalachian communities don’t often identify as authors. This raises important questions about who authors the narratives that circulate from and about Appalachian spaces.
Positionality Statement: Locklear positions herself, like the authors and fictional characters included in her study, as someone who is constantly navigating insider–outsider positionalities in their rural Appalachian communities. Like Locklear, I am a writer and scholar with a rural Appalachian heritage, but I am in many ways disconnected from this heritage. And as Locklear examines, this disconnection can at times feel complicated by the academic literacy with which I have had the privilege to access. At the same time, I feel connected to my family and their land and culture through shared stories and histories. Locklear's text gives voice to these connections and disconnections, which I am constantly navigating in my work across writing, research, teaching, and beyond.
Contributor: Emily Pifer (piferemily@gmail.com) contributed this source citation on August 22, 2024.
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