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A review by elenaakers
Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia by Emily Hilliard
informative
5.0
Picked up this book on a whim at the Seneca Rocks Discovery Center, and wow am I glad I did.
Read in two days because I just couldn’t put it down. For someone not from WV, this author did an incredible job of embedding herself in the culture and understanding the historical and contemporary factors of the region. I think this book is very readable as far as scholarly works go, and despite a few passages being denser, I do think a non-scholarly, but nonfiction-inclined audience would still enjoy. As someone interested in cultural memory studies, this was a particularly interesting book for me, and taught me a lot about the field of folklore, and frankly made me look at the culture of my home state in new ways. I never considered the history of hotdogs. I’ve never heard of Breece Pancake but I’m ordering the story collection asap. Though in recent years people have begun speaking about the diversity of West Virginia historically, the chapter on Scott’s Run really ingrained that in me in a way I never understood before.
I cried reading the chapter about the teacher’s strike and feeling the full circle of socialist labor organizing in a state so often written off as conservative. And also because West Virginia teachers got me to where I am, and they deserve so much better. It also made me emotional to consider this deep, rich, evolving culture of a place I only ever wanted to leave, but it also makes me more conscious of the values I was raised with and more willing to go back for visits and represent West Virginia to outsiders. I’m so obsessed with this idea of communities choosing what to keep and what to change about their traditions, and the acknowledgement that in order to carry culture forward, basic needs need to be met and these communities need to be protected from commodification and extraction (although this does shape culture too). I have so many thoughts to take away from this book and I am so so grateful to Emily Hilliard for doing this work.
Read in two days because I just couldn’t put it down. For someone not from WV, this author did an incredible job of embedding herself in the culture and understanding the historical and contemporary factors of the region. I think this book is very readable as far as scholarly works go, and despite a few passages being denser, I do think a non-scholarly, but nonfiction-inclined audience would still enjoy. As someone interested in cultural memory studies, this was a particularly interesting book for me, and taught me a lot about the field of folklore, and frankly made me look at the culture of my home state in new ways. I never considered the history of hotdogs. I’ve never heard of Breece Pancake but I’m ordering the story collection asap. Though in recent years people have begun speaking about the diversity of West Virginia historically, the chapter on Scott’s Run really ingrained that in me in a way I never understood before.
I cried reading the chapter about the teacher’s strike and feeling the full circle of socialist labor organizing in a state so often written off as conservative. And also because West Virginia teachers got me to where I am, and they deserve so much better. It also made me emotional to consider this deep, rich, evolving culture of a place I only ever wanted to leave, but it also makes me more conscious of the values I was raised with and more willing to go back for visits and represent West Virginia to outsiders. I’m so obsessed with this idea of communities choosing what to keep and what to change about their traditions, and the acknowledgement that in order to carry culture forward, basic needs need to be met and these communities need to be protected from commodification and extraction (although this does shape culture too). I have so many thoughts to take away from this book and I am so so grateful to Emily Hilliard for doing this work.