Emily Hilliard’s Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore & Everyday Culture in Appalachia brings a welcome conversation at the intersection of folklore and Appalachian studies to our field. Hilliard places work on Appalachia and traditional culture by folklorists, such as Mary Hufford and Henry Glassie (particularly Glassie’s “Tradition”), in dialogue with the work of Appalachian historians, including Steven Stoll’s Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia and Ronald D. Eller’s Uneven Ground: Appalachia since 1945. The work examines this intersection by paying close attention to how practitioners of expressive and traditional culture, primarily in West Virginia, engage the region’s history of extraction, exploitation, and marginalization in order to envision, enact, and fight for the future of traditional life in the Mountain State.
Hilliard conducted much of the fieldwork that informs the chapters during her six years as the West Virginia state folklorist, and the book opens with “A Note on Collaborative Ethnographic Methodology and Writing as Public Folklore Praxis” to introduce her fieldwork methodology and writing across genres—academic, creative, ethnographic, and journalistic—with the hope of speaking to a broad audience. Hilliard writes, “Rather than presenting the cultural worker’s perspective as definitive, collaborative ethnography frames narratives as participatory and equitable dialogues, so that dialogue and equity become both the topic and method,” with the goal to “offer examples of how collaborative methodology can be a tool for more public-facing writing and reporting that engages the participation of cultural communities” (xiii-xiv). Hilliard’s note, that cultural work should be community-engaged, critical, and grounded in history “to responsibly and adequately present cultural heritage in a way that resists essentialist, stereotyped, one-dimensional, and exceptionalist portrayals” (xiv), is a call to approach folklife in Appalachia by paying attention to—rather than discounting—the richness and diversity of cultural life here.
Making Our Future employs extensive fieldwork, historical and archival research, and poetic ethnographic writing, and the inclusion of colorful plates and detailed lyrics, maps, and illustrations (many by print artist Dan Davis) lends rich detail to the book. Whether interested in ethnography, folklore, or cultural and regional history, students and professional folklorists concerned with the complex history of the Appalachian region will find a model for conducting folklore-based fieldwork in these pages. It is one example of how we might speak across and connect academic and public folklore, dissolving perceived divisions between theory and praxis, and the book is speaking primarily to these fellow cultural workers. The text, although likely a challenging read for those without college coursework or reading experience in cultural theory, folklore, or Appalachian studies, will be a useful companion to upper-level undergraduate and introductory graduate-level courses in both these fields. The book’s introduction will interest those seeking an overview of what the field of folklore and the subject matter of folklife/cultural heritage are, especially in the context of the Appalachian region. Hilliard’s familiar guiding questions for the book ask, “how is expressive culture evolving through the actions of artists, practitioners, and cultural communities, as well as through the impact of outside forces—folklorists and cultural workers included? How is folklife being transmitted across time and space, between people and across generations? How are communities using those cultural forms to negotiate and affirm identity? What is the role of expressive culture within historical moments?” (17). Each of the eight chapters seeks to guide readers through these questions with specific case studies that examine how various forms of folklife are engaged, shaped, and transmitted.
Although each chapter broadly touches on similar themes, especially how class, race, place, and history inform the continual making of expressive culture in the state of West Virginia, some clear pairings also emerge. Chapter 1, “We All Own it: The Interracial, Intergenerational Community Counternarrative of the Scotts Run Museum,” and chapter 7, “Will the Squared Circle Be Unbroken? Independent Pro Wrestling as a West Virginia Tradition,” offer readers a look at how two (quite different) groups or communities of practice employ narratives—counter or folk—to address race, history, and community through the strategic application of vernacular tradition. Chapter 3, “Up Here You Use What You’ve Got: Foodways and the Elasticity of Tradition in the Swiss Community of Helvetia, West Virginia,” and chapter 6, “Friends of Coleslaw: On the West Virginia Hot Dog,” examine how foodways (whether delicately fried rosette fritters or hot dogs with chili, mustard, onions, and coleslaw) present unique cultural forms that also reveal connections to class, immigration, and gendered labor practices. Chapter 4, “Something Deeply Rooted: The Invisible Landscape of Breece D’J Pancake’s Milton, West Virginia,” and chapter 8, “Wild, Wonderful, Wasteland West Virginia: Speculative Futures, Vernacular Culture, and the Embodied Tourism of Fallout 76,” both engage with the narrativization, mapping, and cultural making of place—whether through vernacular, orally transmitted stories of a real and literary landscape or through the digital, speculative imaginary of a post-apocalyptic place that informs vernacular performance, virtually and physically.
Finally, chapter 2, “So I May Write of All These Things: The Individual and the Collective in the Songwriting of Shirley Campbell, Ella Hanshaw, Cora Hairston, and Elaine Purkey,” and chapter 5, “The Daughters of Mother Jones: Lessons of Care Work and Labor Struggle in the Expressive Culture of the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike,” address invisible and creative traditions that negotiate and connect personal experience, domestic or care work, and collective struggle that Hilliard reads “as a resistance to a structure of extraction and patriarchal confinements” (82), where both the social function and development of expressive culture are capable of creating “a new reality in resistance to dominant power structures” (119). Hilliard’s interest in resistance, care, and the fight for better social conditions through the creative making and practice of everyday life in place is echoed throughout the book, but especially in the final pages.
The conclusion, “We’re Fighting for Our Future: Toward a Visionary Folklore,” wraps up the entire project with the author’s main intervention, a framework for folklorists that is focused on the future, which she calls visionary folklore. Visionary folklore builds upon Henry Glassie’s definition of tradition, Frederic Jameson’s argument that science fiction tells us more about the present than the future, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s new conception of anticipatory heritage and collecting the unfolding present, and Audre Lorde’s reflections on future-building as “a collective and creative project that in turn lends hope to the present, making it endurable” (211). Whereas Glassie’s tradition is about the creation of the future, which the author argues “is still weighted in the past” (209), Hilliard’s is focused on the fight for it: “What must we fight for in the present so that future communities may retain their sovereignty and have agency over how their traditions are transmitted?” (210). Although the concept of visionary folklore is not directly woven into the book’s chapters and risks reading as an afterthought because of this absence, Hilliard’s notion joins a chorus of practitioners, cultural workers, and folklorists who are grappling with these very concerns. I am reminded of Dorothy Noyes’s final question to readers in Humble Theory: “Before we relocate completely from the heritage industry to the resilience industry, might we instead find a way of crossing that threshold to participate in the building of a tangible future?” (432). Like Noyes, Hilliard’s visionary folklore asks that we acknowledge the tie between the sustainability of a community’s material reality and the sustainability of its expressive culture. The next step for us, she argues, is to “be more attuned to the future life of traditions beyond sustainability, and actively work in collaboration with communities to combat the outside destructive forces, such as privatization, extraction, and austerity, that disrupt them and block their agency to negotiate the transmission of their traditions” (212).
This commitment, she notes, is also an acknowledgement that, collectively, all of our futures “are inherently twined, all part of a diverse, just, equitable, and pluralistic society” (215). If we as folklorists are to move forward with this function of our work, which Hilliard notes has long been a value in our field, we should also consider whose futures we have or have not yet looked to. Future cultural workers, for example, might also reach not only the people and groups who have been underrepresented in the cultural imaginary of West Virginia but also the places—moving further off the paved paths (in the same vein of David Todd Lawrence and Elaine Lawless’s work in Pinhook, Missouri) and onto the dirt roads, up the hollers, to reach also those rural, unincorporated places that have not been mapped, whose histories have not been archived outside of their own communities. If, as Hilliard concludes, tradition is made through the fight for the future, it is also being built and fought for off the interstates and highways (often without prior literary, digital, or journalistic documentation or collaboration) by people who have long recognized their collective strength and employ a shared creativity, history, and identity to build and make their futures. It’s all a worthy future and one for which our field—thanks especially to its focus on collaboration, advocacy, and creation—is fighting. But we still have much to do, much to learn. The “dirt roads” (and their continual construction) beckon; their visions unfold as we inch closer to those making them.
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[Review length: 1531 words • Review posted on December 11, 2023]