Chapter 3 - Race and LGBTQ+ Rights in Gothic Appalachian Literature

Summary

Teresa Goddu saliently notes that “the American gothic is haunted by race” and that “when race is restored to the darkness of American literature, the gothic reappears as a viable category.” Goddu also traces the emergence of the southern gothic, where slavery, segregation, and systemic racism heavily influence the region's gothicism. By necessity, as a subgenre within both the American and southern gothic, the Appalachian gothic is haunted by slavery and settler colonization. Engaging with this haunting past and its impacts on the present is a critical part of challenging the misconceptions of the region. Writing from both rural and urban experiences, Indigenous, Black, immigrant, and first-generation writers play a critical role in challenging and rewriting the region, often exploring intersectionality at the crossroads of race, class, gender, and sexuality, and this chapter moves from a discussion of race to LGBTQ+ rights. As Hilary Glasby, Sherrie Gradin, and Rachael Ryseron argue, “Appalachian queerness remains underrepresented, misunderstood, sometimes muted, and sometimes invisible.” The Appalachian gothic plays a significant role in exposing historical and contemporaneous injustices and prejudices across the region and challenges the failure to register Appalachia's complexity and diversity.

Engaging with the region's diversity obviously serves to write back against monolithic ideas of Appalachian culture as white, heteronormative, masculine, and conservative, ideas that were reinforced after the 2016 presidential election, and the stamp of “Trump Country” that marked out Appalachia, aligning it with the “racism, cruelty, bigotry and abuse” that were the hallmarks of Donald Trump's campaign and presidency. In a period where hard-won equal rights for women and LGBTQ+ people are threatened, and far-right populism across Western democracies stirs up what McCollum lists as “the stench of slavery, anti-Semitism, genocide, fascism, and neo-Nazism,” as well as Islamophobia, it is vital to explore the ways Appalachian authors, both before and since 2016, have deployed the gothic to expose how such sentiments were never fully expunged and what is at stake in their frightful resurgence.

Race and Gothic Appalachian Literature

Appalachia's racial diversity has a long and complicated history. Essays across William H. Turner and Edward J. Cabbell's edited collection Blacks in Appalachia, “demonstrate that Black Appalachians were some of America's first blacks—appearing almost a century before the landing at Jamestown.”